An entertaining State of the Union review full of history and humor sprinkled generously with spicy snark!
Colby Cosh is almost up there with Mark Steyn in the "Genius in the written word" category. Please follow this link and read his whole article. This is writing at its very best. The man is an artist.
On the President calling out the Supreme Court, and how our earliest presidents would have greatly disapproved:
On the President calling out the Supreme Court, and how our earliest presidents would have greatly disapproved:
To a man, they would have been horrified at the spectacle of a President pugnaciously dressing down a Supreme Court, as Obama did last night in his animadversion upon the Citizens United ruling.He quickly scans the history of SOTU's past, mentioning that Proto-Progressive Woodrow Wilson started the tradition of the president starring personally in this useless yearly political theater:
I was hoping for Chief Justice Roberts to rise to his feet and lead the black-robed group right out of the building. Better still, perhaps, if they’d just dispersed in all directions like a murder of crows startled by a gunshot.
Nowadays, the President gets to play rock star once a year with the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House as his rhythm section. (Though any bar-band bass player who upstaged his frontman with deranged mugging as often as Nancy Pelosi does would quickly find himself in a back-alley dumpster with a Rickenbacker colonoscopy.)This is commentary at its very best; full of humor and history, sprinkled generously with spicy snark. Go read the whole thing here: MacLeans - Colby Cosh
But there is certainly one advantage in having him confront the legislature and the judiciary in person: it exposes him to laughter. Obama, who is unbelievably relaxed and cool on the highest occasions of state, deliberately invited some of it. But the very audible chuckling which greeted his mention of “the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change” was surely neither anticipated nor welcome.
3 comments:
It really was a Joe Wilson moment. Except Roberts kept his cool and mouthed the words instead, but of course the cameras caught it.
The press gets advance copies of the speech, so they know who to zoom in on and when.
In the words of someone who was a whole bunch smarter than me, "Ignorance breeds contempt".
May it be the remembrance he is deservingly afforded.
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