Obamaspeak

categories: U.S.A.

Liebe Meine Palin,

ich bin dein Pal,
du bist meine Palin,

so, wir koennen ueber USA reden.

WARUM GEHT ES NICHT MIT POLITIK DA?

Oder, warum ist alles UNBEKANNT?

Auf Englisch, Susa:

As you konw, I live outside the USA. Why? In part, because it's so murky. One reads in the business press that the USA is bankrupt, facing an ever-larger debt, at end impossible. And this jibes with what the head of the Diplomacy School in Moscow says: that in 2010 the USA will break apart, simply due to its colossal debt.

If I try to forward the email I wrote to this head of the Diplomacy School in Moscow, all signals get jammed. No email can get through. Especially not to journalists covering the story, e.g., Wall Street Journal. Discussing the prediction that the USA might break up is, at least with high-profile journalists, impossible.

But learning from Obama what is going on is also impossible.

I had a conversation about this with Heimo Lattner.

I said, he doesn't speak, he reads. He reads the Teleprompter. He does this very, very much, nearly all the time. Journalists have remarked on this. It seems he has a staff of writers preparing word-processed pablum, all the time.

So, with Heimo, I said, "Er hat keine Meinung."
He has no opüinion.

Heimo: "Ja, nur Konsens."
Just some consensus.

It all comes out as some sort of Mush.

Not Newspeak exactly.
Not the opposite of what is claimed.
But Obamaspeak.
A word-processed porridge of something for everyone and nothing for anyone.

So, despite what the Fed chief keeps saying, that
things are terrible, we get this... assurance
that somehow everything will be all right, if
we just pay attention to his prepared remarks.

Watch this blog for analyses of Obamaspeak,
and what it means for the US and the world.

Dein Pal,
Peter Fend

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Pablum vs. Contempt

Submitted by Steven Kaplan on Sun, 2010-08-15 20:45.

Peter:

I imagine most contemporary politicians use a teleprompter when delivering prepared remarks. Do you find Obama's content and delivery to be "word-processed porridge"? Is it possible you preferred George W. Bush for his freshness and spontaneity, his honest competence and unvarnished eloquence?

I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

They misunderestimated me.

It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber.

I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.

I'm hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.

I was reading Maureen Dowd's "No Love From the Lefties" column earlier today. I know, it's in the NY Crimes, a discredited "mouthpiece" organ as per the suave Euro-inflected intelligentsia. Still, I thought some of her remarks on the impractical disloyalty of the American left bears repetition here.

...Republicans often find a way to exploit their extremes for political advantage, while Democratic extremes typically do damage to a Democratic president.

One of the most disgusting things about Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, and now the former maverick John McCain, is that they are happy to be co-opted by the radicals in their party to form one movement against President Obama.

On the Republican side, the crazies often end up helping the Republican leadership. On the Democratic side, the radicals are constantly sniping at Obama, expressing their feelings of betrayal...

W.’s reign of error so enraged Democrats that they were bound by one desire: to get rid of him...

After Bush, Democrats thought the way to paper over the distinction between liberals and radical lefties was to call everyone progressives. But calling yourself a progressive is just a stupid disguise where you pretend the contradiction isn’t there...

There are deep schisms within the Democratic Party that were masked for a time, first by Bush and then by Obama’s election. Now that the Democrats have the presidency and the power and can enact legislation, it’s apparent that the word progressive is kind of meaningless.

President Obama is testing how elastic he can be, how much realism he can have before he betrays his idealism. For better and worse, he is an elitist and a situationist. But the professional left — like the professional right — often considers pragmatism a moral compromise...

Frankly, I am more content to suffer the "mush" you claim to find in Obama, rather than another term of Republican misrule. They are still out there, always ready to seize power. Their cutthroat directness and arrogant contempt for the truth is infinitely more distasteful than any notion of Obamaspeak.

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