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Posted on 10/28/2009 2:47:35 PM PDT by honestabe010
Rocco Landesman, the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) chairman, said, in part:
"This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists."...
(Excerpt) Read more at thewoodwardreport.com ...
That should be worth another few billions in grants to the NEA.
Reminds me of a quotation from that movie Broadcast News.
“I think anyone who puckers up their lips and presses it against their bosses buttocks and then *smooches* is an ass-kisser.”
I know the movie is about the TV news business in the 80’s, but if you watch it today, you’d swear it was about the O administration.
Here’s another one that could apply to Barry.
“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I’m semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing... he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance... Just a tiny bit.”
“I’m still unconvinced about his writing ability.”
No one else is either - Bill Ayres admitted ghost writing “Dreams” and likely did the other book with Hussein’s name on it.
“MauMaui”?
That most certainly is false!! How dare you spread malicious lies about our new JC! You do know he signed a hate crimes bill aimed at people who say unkind and untrue things about him?
:)
“and obviously genius (sorry Glenn Beck)”
I don’t know about a genius. He certainly was smart, and his intellectual—let alone physical—prodigiousness puts most recent politicians to shame. Just think of it, between serving in various legislative and executive capacities, endlessly campaigning and promoting causes (above all, himself), taking extended hunting trips, and fighting in a war, he managed to write something like 20 books. None of the were masterpieces, but at least one, “The Winning of the West,” is occasionally still read.
Still, genius is a bit much. He is more notable as a political dynamo than a writer. I put him somewhere in the middle of your “genius” and Henry Adams’ “pure act”. He was a lot more than pure act, but definitely not as conscientious as Adams.
As for Beck, it’s not that TR’s a moron, it’s that he’s wrong. Or maybe Beck has called him a moron, I don’t know. But most importantly, he’s wrong.
That’s just not the same in English - reading it in Latin was more stiring in my 6th grade Latin class.
Julie also met an untimely end...
“no sneaky Helen Thomas posts!”
And NO PICTURES!!!!
please.
My own IQ has consistently tested genius, and from my extensive reading on TR I recognize him as easily my intellectual superior (and, certainly there are many in that category - I didn't mean to imply that genius was particularly remarkable).
TR's intellectual capacity was breathtaking.
BTW, TR may have been wrong. But if so, it is because he attributed to man a greater measure of inherent decency than is actually realized in practice.
Right. And Hitlers “Mein Kampf’’ put him above Julius Ceaser. Who writes this tripe?
Right. And Hitlers “Mein Kampf’’ put him above Julius Ceaser. Who writes this tripe?
Caesar wrote about conquest.
Bro doesn’t write, he whines “Where’s daddy?”
And we wonder why U.S. children are so stupid.
I don't believe Lincoln ever wrote a book, but he did write his own speeches (really well), unlike the O.
I wish the author would cite me one book written by Abraham Lincoln. Many brillant speeches, but I am unaware of any book our 16th President wrote.
What about U.S. Grant? See Taranto’s piece:
‘This Was the Noblest Roman of Them All’
It looks as if the job of communications director is still vacant over at the National Endowment for the Arts—or, if it’s been filled, it is by someone no more competent than the departed Yosi Sergant. NEA chairman Rocco Landesman embarrassed himself by giving a preposterous speech in Brooklyn last week. Any decent PR flack could have saved him from making the following statement:
There is a new president and a new NEA. The president first. This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.
Wow, way to speak truth to power! Well, except that he isn’t quite speaking the truth, as Commentary’s John Steele Gordon points out:
Herbert Hoover wrote sixteen books in his life, including Fishing for Fun—and to Wash Your Soul, published three years after his death, and a translation (with his wife) from the Latin of De re Metallica. Just a guess, but I don’t think there are many ghosted 640-page translations around.
Woodrow Wilson was a college professor and president before entering politics. Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, his best known work and one that ran through many editions, was not ghost written. . . .
Landesman implicitly accuses Theodore Roosevelt of being, unlike Barack Obama, a second-rate writer. Roosevelt wrote a total of 38 books in his life (not to mention countless magazine articles and thousands of letters, all while holding a day job and living only sixty years). His first, The Naval War of 1812, written when he was 23, is considered a basic historical text on that subject and is still both highly readable and in print. Will The Audacity of Hope be in print a 125 [sic] years after it was published? . . .
Landesman seems ignorant of even the existence of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. They were written in the last months of Grant’s life (he died in agony from throat cancer three days after he finished the manuscript). They are universally regarded as the greatest military memoirs since Caesar’s Commentaries, and among the genuine masterpieces of American literature. Perhaps Mr. Landesman should give them a try if he doesn’t object to reading memoirs written by someone who had actually done something (like— you know—save the Union) before writing them.
Other than that, though, the speech was accurate. OK, not the whole speech, but the paragraph we quoted.
Landesman’s praise for Obama as a writer reminds us of the joke that’s been going around: Why didn’t Barack Obama win the Nobel Prize in Literature? Because he actually did write two books!
That doesn’t follow. It assumes, weirdly, that there haven’t been politician-writers of import since Caesar. What about Churchill? What about Hitler?
If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United Kingdom was the most powerful country the world in the 19th century, then the author of Leaves from the journal of our life in the highlands, from 1848 to 1861 to which are prefixed and added extracts from the same journal giving an account of earlier visits to Scotland, and tours in England and Ireland and yachting excursions by Victoria Queen of Great Britain has the aame claim as Obama.
Also, since Caesar? I think a few chaps between Julius and Barack can claim to have written better and more influential works: Marcus Aurealius and Alfred the Great to name just two.
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