I could not help contrasting the pretty good essay Krauthammer (Leaving the People Hungry) wrote about Obama's inaugural speech and this perfectly polished gem from Mark Steyn:
Subhead:
His boring inaugural doesn't diminish his hotness in the eyes of his usual acolytes.
Steyn shows you the dagger:
How dazzling is President Obama? So dazzling that he didn't merely give a dazzling inaugural speech. Any old timeserving hack could do that. Instead, he had the sheer genius to give a flat dull speech full of the usual shopworn boilerplate. Brilliant! At a stroke, he not only gently lowered the expectations of those millions of Americans and billions around the world for whom his triumphant ascendancy is the only thing that gives their drab little lives any meaning, but he also emphasized continuity by placing his own unprecedented incandescent megastar cool squarely within the tradition of squaresville yawneroo white middle-aged plonking mediocrities who came before him.
Plunges it in:
At a stroke – OK, that's two strokes, like an Italian moped, but that just shows how cosmopolitan he is – anyway, Obama artfully charted a middle course between the Scylla of unmeetable expectations and the Charybdis of his own charisma and chugged instead in the placid rhetorical shallows of "gathering clouds," "raging storms," "icy currents"… In a speech on climate change, this would send the crowd fleeing in terror to hole up in the hills and forage for berries. But, in an inaugural address, this was Obama's most inspired gambit yet. Only a truly great leader would have the courage to reach for the skies in such leaden and earthbound prose.
Twists the knife:
Oh, well. So much for the consensus of the expert analysts. Meanwhile, The New Yorker put him on the cover dressed as George Washington – a Founding Father for a new America! Disdaining such insulting and belittling comparisons to discredited old slaveowners with bad teeth and wigs even more obvious than that Illinois governor's, the actress-activist Susan Sarandon compared him with Jesus. "He is a community organizer like Jesus was," she said, "and now we're a community and he can organize us." What sort of community should we be? Surveying the "rapt eyes" of the congregation, Ethan Baron, writing in the Vancouver Province, said he hadn't seen anything like it "since a guy I used to work with brought me to visit his weird sex cult in California." And he meant it as a compliment.
The prose does not get any more purple:
But don't worry, the sex isn't gonna be weird or anything. "Oh, yes, yes, yessssssss, we can!" I whimpered, as his smoldering eyes bored deep into the very core of my being and our souls met and I knew he was the only man who would ever win my heart, a heart beating so fast and loud I could barely hear what he was saying – something about executive orders, I think. "Oh, yes, give me one right now!" I cried, as my palpitating bosom burst the ties of my bodice causing my leg to vibrate so much my bustle fell off.
"Aye, you're a comely lass," said Squire Barack, as my tresses tumbled over my stays and his riding crop fluttered teasingly up my thigh. "But I don't need to go a-wenchin' in the White House Press Room…"
"No, please, good sir," I begged, as he glided past me and gave a saucy wink to the chamber maid from The Washington Post…
The man is a genius.
From Texas Eagle at FreeRepublic:
Steyn should write romance novels. I can almost see the cover. Fabio Obama carrying a half-dressed Chris Matthews out of the surf...
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