To use Andrew Klavan's crude but effective term, the speech itself is "craptastic:" a tissue of falsehoods, embarassing cliches and the sort of generality that used to be called glittering.
But the journey is long and the journey is hard. And we don't have much time left to make that journey.Oo, "journeys." How poetic.
It wouldn't even be fun to fisk this, the writing is so bad. Remember in the speech on health care a few weeks ago when his writers actually let him say, "not all the details are worked out yet" and offered historical analogies that cut against his argument? How about this line
there should be no illusions that the hardest part of our journey is in front of us.Fellas, that means precisely the opposite of what you think it does. I quit teaching high school not to have read essays like that anymore.
Update: Here's a more sober dissection should you need one. The America bashing was quite severe.
No one believes America’s history is pristine; we are all familiar with the catalogue of our own sins, beginning with slavery. Other presidents have recognized them, and a few have given voice to them. But it was done in the context of a reverence for America—for what it has been and stands for, for what it is and can be. Think of the words of George Washington, who said of America, “I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” That is a noble sentiment from a man whose love of country knew no bounds. They are also words that I cannot imagine President Obama saying, at least with conviction. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like his country or admire things about it; it means that he has yet to really speak out for it. And it means that he has shown, so far at least, that he is more interested in advancing his interests than in speaking on behalf of the nation that elected him. There are enough critics of America in the world; we don’t need to add America’s president to that list.
Perhaps Mr. Obama will come to understand that there is a problem when the president of the United States—an “inestimable jewel,” Lincoln called her—has harsher things to say about his own country than he does about many of the worst regimes on Earth.
It is all quite disturbing, and to have to say this about an American president almost makes me sick.
