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.
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.
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