Here are some of the sub-intelligent, loopy headlines in mainstream media, in anticipation of zero’s State of Disunion extravaganza. They’re enough to turn the stomach, as though His text (written at an eighth-grade level, “as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test”) can alter reality.
I won’t be covering another of zero’s “Stalinesque Extravaganzas.” Just about everything in the 2010 column, “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State,” still applies:
Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State
Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.
A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’) sensibility” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire has described the annual State of the Union address. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derbyshire in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” in which John (he’s a friend) goes on to detail how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. (This year, the most repulsive among the representatives staked out aisle seats for themselves, starting early in the morning.)
“On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45). The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”
The razzmatazz includes a display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the royal box. These are “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate.” Last year it was the family of the girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter. This year’s “Lenny Skutnik” was Debbie Bosanek, Warren Buffett’s secretary. Bosanek is supposed to embody the Barf(fett) Rule, described by the Divine One thus: “If you make more than a million dollars a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.”
“We Are Doomed” deconstructs this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and the trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.” In Obama’s simplistic scheme of things—as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, “for the third straight Address, the President’s speech was written at an eighth-grade level”—to recreate the glory of America, it is essential to reinvent the state. Since Obama has no understanding of how the economy works and why it collapsed, he honestly thinks that centrally planned political projects are every bit as productive as profit-driven investments of private property.
Ever the source of deafening demagoguery, the president promised …
LANA Mercer is a classical liberal writer, based in the United States. She pens WND's longest-standing paleolibertarian column. ILANA is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. She is the author of "Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa." ILANA's website is WWW.IlanaMercer.com . She blogs at www.barelyablog.com
Copyright 2014 Ilana Mercer
I had to close out of Twitter Sunday night because the Grammytards were making me sick. I closed out of it tonight because the politards are making me sick.
ReplyDeleteIf ever comes a day when the majority of people in this country quit fawning over narcissists, whether or the Hollywood or the DC variety, that will be the day we can finally start to rebuild a free and decent society.