A Shakespearean speech for Obama’s silly season
Did you ever notice how often Obama uses the word “silly” to describe questions he doesn’t want to answer and issues he doesn’t want to address?
It’s an interesting ploy, a way to escape being pinned down while attempting to avoid charges of evasion. He could answer, of course. But he doesn’t want to waste his time on “silliness” because he, Obama, has a higher calling.
But this is not condescending. Not in the least.
Elitism? It’s a silly charge that “amuses” him. After all, it can’t be true because—he was raised by a single mom and was once on food stamps! He went to school on a scholarship, and took out student loans!! These things no doubt automatically act as early inoculations that confer lifelong immunity against the disease of elitism.
And, what’s more, Obama and his wife had the arduous experience of living “for the first 13 years of our marriage up until three years ago in a three-bedroom condo without a garage so if you live in Chicago that means you’re scraping ice every morning.”
It’s not exactly Lincolnesque on the hardship scale, nor is it equal to walking twenty miles in the snow on bleeding feet. But I suppose a three-bedroom apartment is really roughing it these days—compared to Obama’s (non-elitist) digs now, the house he purchased three years ago for which the couple paid a cool two million.
I don’t begrudge Obama and his wife their success or their home. He and his family have every right to enjoy the fruits of their hard work. But to claim solidarity with the downtrodden of the earth because a young couple with two excellent careers and salaries has to scrape ice off a car (even in Chicago) is hogwash. I might even be inclined to call it “silly.”
And, since I seem to be in a “Julius Caesar” mode today, I offer an update of Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Shakespeare’s play of that name (with appropriate gender-neutral PC additions):
Friends, voters, countrymen and women, lend me your ears;
I come to critique Barack, not to praise him.
The evil that men and women do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their campaign;
So let it be with Barack. The noble Hil’ray
Hath told you Barack was elitist:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And dismissively hath Barack answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Hil’ray and the rest –
For Hil’ray is an honourable man or woman;
So are they all, all honourable men or women (except for the honourable transgendered)-
Come I to speak in Barack’s campaign.
He is your friend, faithful and just to you:
But Hir’ray says he is elitist;
And Hil’ray is an honourable man or woman.
He hath bought many condos as his homes
Whose garages were nowhere to be seen:
Did this in Barack seem elitist?
When that the poor have cried, Barack hath wept:
Elitism should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Hil’ray says he is elitist;
And Hil’ray is an honourable man or woman.
You all did see that on his campaign tour
His followers did reach epiphany,
Which he would joke about: was this elitist?
Yet Hil’ray says he is elitist;
And, sure, she is an honourable man or woman.
I speak not to disprove what Hil’ray spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to vote for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men and women have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart’s in Indiana there with Barack,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
And here’s Marlon Brando, of all people, performing the speech in its original form, complete with fake British accent:
What more can one ask of neo?
Sheer brilliance!
The real history of Caesar’s assassination, the intrigue that surrounded it, and the ultimate end results are always a fascinating topic. To live in such perilous times would be a hard challenge to meet, yet to live and observe in order to return with the news of who did what and why, at the dawn of the Roman Empire, would be a fitting legacy for such a challenge.
Greetings:
Back when I first started college, a survey course in sociology was a requirement. One of the concepts that I retained was what was referred to as a “reference group.” This was basically the alignment of an individual with a class group of which he was not objectively a member. For example, a college student could be working as a taxi driver (Working Class) while preparing for his ascendency into the Middle Class. Thus, his current behavior would be effected to a greater extent by the mores of his future group than by his current group. Kind of explains why taxi drivers love college boys so much.
“Well, on second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place!”
Now, why can’t I get this across to my SILLY liberal buddies?? 😉
Neo,
Nice points, and funny ending too! Gave me a smile.
Though I think I can understand how a two million dollar item is “roughing it”. He is a leftist, and everything is relative, and he has spent his time with some very well off people. In his social pool two million means what relative to the people around him? A new car? (I suggest the Bugatti Veyron might be a nice choice). Maybe to him, he was living in a car that a contemporary might be driving. How can he be elitist when he is on the bottom of the stack, working his way up?
In his social pool two million means …
The butler’s butler has more than that under his mattress.
Obama also says that his opponents’ comments “tickle” him.
Only smug, patronizing pri–
Uh, jerks, say they’re “tickled” by someone’s comments.
Too bad that America’s first serious black presidential candidate turned out to be such a pri–
Uh, jerk.
My father always told me that he walked to school every day, even in the deepest snow.
Of course, I was aware that the school was just catty-corner from his house.
Context matters.
Great parody but I wish you hadn’t put in the tape of Brando massacring one of the greatest speeches by the Bard.
Oh and another thing: when did Obama’s mum get food stamps?
An Ode To Obama Fans
Tread lightly
in the dark
abyss
of words
crafted
as a web,
to snare
so sweetly,
the frail
threads of
a tortured
mind.
With songs
of worlds
imagined….
A harvest
for the
blade of
reality.
JCC
dissect leftism has a nice commentary on his elitism…
however, the key paragraph, which i agree with a whole lot (since it fits sociopathy), is as follows: The above quote and the waffle remark are both telling us the same thing: That Obama has difficulty keeping up his “nice guy” image. Keeping it up quite simply wears him out. It is not who he really is so keeping up that image tires him and he just HAS to rest from it. It is not who he really is.
And as someone who has studied psychopathy (I have a couple of academic journal articles on the subject) that is very familiar. Psychopaths also typically present a “nice guy” image — something that sucks in the females wholesale. The psychopath says and does all the right things and people promptly put their trust in him. And then when they least expect it, he “goes bad” on them. “Why did he do that?” is the typical distressed response, “He was so nice and then he went and did ….”.
The sucker in the story gets very thoroughly betrayed and has no clue as to why the psychopath suddenly changed. The answer, of course, is that the nice guy act was all a pretense in the first place and because it was not genuine the psychopath just could not keep it up for long. The “change” that distressed the sucker was the mask being dropped and the psychopath reverting to his true type.
And that is what we see in both reports of Obama’s behaviour above. By the time he got to his waffle he just could not keep up his act, even under the full glare of media scrutiny. He HAD to have a rest from acting. So the Obama we see on the campaign trail is just a false front for the very dismal soul that lies beneath it. If America elects Obama, it will not get what it voted for. It will get a horror. An entire nation will have been conned.
Bill Clinton is a psychopath too. He too is known for suddenly “losing it” at times. But Slick Willy was led around by his penis. Obama will probably be led around by the hate that he sucked up in listening to 20 years of Jeremiah Wright’s preaching.
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the – Web Reconnaissance for 04/25/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
this excellent comment excerpt sis from the american thinker, which excerpted town hall.
Yes, Barack Obama, We Are Bitter
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MaryGrabar/2008/04/20/yes,_barack_obama,_we_are_bitter
its the words of mary grabar a slovenian american…
We know who you’re talking about, Barack Obama, when you talk about Pennsylvania and the Midwest, about small towns where the jobs have left. [….]
You’re talking about white people who have neither the family connections nor the racial credentials to gain entrance to the world that you inhabit. Many of the people you’re talking about are those whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe who came to these places to work in steel mills, coal mines, and factories. We know the code words.
You’re talking about people whose culture is little known. We have been pretty quiet. We never tried to impose our culture on everyone. We never insisted on putting pictures of ourselves in our native dress into schoolbooks or mandating that our stories and songs be part of the curriculums.
We tried to maintain our culture without government aid, by forming our own churches and groups, and building Polish, Ukrainian, and Slovenian halls.
We never wore buttons declaring “Slav Power” or grouped together for purposes of intimidation or violence.
The power we asked for was the power of the paycheck which we earned in factories, steel mills, coal mines, or by cleaning houses. Yet, we were taken aside and told that because of affirmative action it was no use trying to advance off the assembly line; we were told in “diversity workshops” that people of color had to be promoted over more qualified white people. I know this, Barack, because I have family members and friends who worked in factories.
“a three-bedroom condo without a garage”
Oliver Wendell Holmes had poor starvling Obama’s number a hundred years ago in his poem Contentment:
Little I ask; my wants are few,
I only want a hut of stone,
(A very plain brownstone will do,)
That I may call my own.
(The full poem can be found in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.)
This past week, Trump offered to give $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choice if he releases his college and passport records. Obama responded by telling his own joke about him and Trump fighting while growing up in Kenya. http://www.bit.ly/WRFiT5
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