Posted on 01/15/2009 3:10:06 PM PST by Sioux-san
"The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM’s energies alive.,,,"
The highly indicative sentence above comes from an 1800-word article that Barack Obama wrote for Columbia’s weekly news magazine, Sundial, at the height of the KGB-generated anti-nuke craze in March 1983. Obama was twenty-one at the time.
The sentence nicely captures Obama’s skill as a writer. The noun, “belief,” and the verb, “keep,” don’t agree—one of an appalling five such noun-verb mismatches in the essay--and the punctuation is fully random.
More problematically, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama had warned his readers about the “the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.”
In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are “moribund”—that is “nearly dead.” How their debilitated state keeps the “energies” of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) “alive” is apparently left to the reader’s imagination.
(Excerpt) Read more at cashill.com ...
Bill Ayers didn't. On the other hand, I bet Bill Ayers balks at correct use of commas, so if you want to see if it's Bill or some other terrorist writing Obama's autobiography, just check their other materials and look real hard at the commas.
I'm pretty sure Obama can't correctly use the comma in English nor the dot in Arabic ~ a man who is functionally illiterate in at least two languages, and maybe three.
I would wager there are no commas in the speeches that are written for Obama.
Instead, I bet they use ledes (...) to indicate a pause. And arbitrary line breaks (rather than paragraphs) to create the cadence.
It's a not uncommon way of writing speeches. And it is also exactly the way virtually all ad copy is written (voiceover or print ad copy). In other words, the material is written as the writer wants it delivered.
Right now Obama has demonstrated fairly remarkably that he is, in fact, functionally illiterate when it comes to written material as well as tongue-tied.
We've never had a more inarticulate President. Amazingly his core constituency is even less adept ~ they think he's a master at speaking.
I think that somebody's been cheating at school Fur Shur.
Thanks! So many radical left connections, so little time. :)
I use the technique when a character in one of my stories is speaking. Establishing a cadence is useful to pull a reader into the story. Some famous writers used the technique of inserting narrator’s words smack in the middle of a character speaking. Isn’t that the old bugaboo, ‘style’?
Thanks for the bHo deception ping
Bingo. In fact, academics were once fond of tut-tutting over Shakespeare's punctuation, till an actor showed them how the commas and semicolons, in particular, in the working scripts (which is what they were, as opposed to plays intended for publication) served as vocal stage directions.
And our new emperor, Milk-Chocolate Charlie McCarthy, apparently can't tell one from the other.
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The Forty Years' War for the American mind is over, and we lost. In the country of the irreparably, irredeemably dumbed-down, the glib dunce is king.
de nada!
Huh?
I think he was referring to your “more evidence” comment right after the article. He was asking, “more evidence of what?” He apparently didn’t understand what this post was about (whether or not Obami actually wrote Dreams From My Father).
Obama didn’t live in Kansas, his mat. grandparents grew up there, and his mother was born there. As far as I have reaad, Obama lived in Honolulu and Jakarta, Indonesia, while growing up. He also lived with his mother in Seattle for a year or two as an infant, when she attended U. of Washington (1961-62). I have also read mom left him in Hawaii with her mother during this time, so this seems to be another of the uncertainties/mysteries of Obama’s life.
Thanks - I didn’t get the comment, but it is true that people do comment without reading anything first. I had to look up incomprssible (thought he meant incomprehensible).
This article pretty much sums up the Obama 'magic'...
From AsiaTimesOnline
Feb 26, 2008
Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. ...
Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.
There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech. ..."
Article: Obama's women reveal his secret
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html
Saul Alinsky on "Change"...
From Rules for Radicals, Alinsky outlines his strategy in organizing, writing:
"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution."
Saul Alinsky, The Latter Rain
http://latter-rain.com/ltrain/alinski.htm
I intend to spend the duration of his presidency pointing out what a dumbass he is, and what dupes those who think he’s brilliant are.
Now, how’s MY grammar?
Now, how’s MY grammar?
I didn't say anything about grammar.
Since this article is about the dumbass-elect’s grammar, I just wanted to make sure I didn’t mess something up. That would be embarassing.
yes it wood
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