Fast brain versus uh, uh, uh

Chicago Tribune ^ | May 27, 2011 | Meghan Daum

[Gondring]

Apparently, a lot of people consider President Barack Obama to be bumblingly inarticulate. "The guy can't talk his way out of a paper bag!" a reader wrote to me recently. "Sarah Palin is a brilliant speaker. It's the president whose sentences are undiagrammable," said another in response to a column I wrote about Palin. It's not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives, who hold this view. A Google search of "does Obama have a speech impediment" turns up several pages of discussion among the president's supporters and critics alike. Admittedly, the president is given to a lot of pauses, "uhs" and sputtering starts to his sentences. As polished as he often is before large crowds (where the adjective "soaring" is often applied to his speeches), his impromptu speaking frequently calls to mind a doctoral candidate delivering a wobbly dissertation defense.

Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can't keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you're a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president's stammer doesn't bother you; [...]

That's kind of ironic, given that the godfather of the intellectual stammer is arguably none other than the paterfamilias of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr. [...]

Obama's problem is not that he's an intellectual (for the sake of argument let's define it as someone who is scholarly, broadly informed and distinguished as a thinker). It's that he sounds like an intellectual. [...]

[21twelve]

“When he reads words that others write for him, he sounds brilliant!

Unless of course the word is Corpsman.

[HollyB]

A couple of days late, but thought you’d enjoy this anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omHUsRTYFAU

[Grizzled Bear]

I hope Ms Daum wiped her chin after writing this piece.

[aruanan]

As polished as he often is before large crowds (where the adjective "soaring" is often applied to his speeches), his impromptu speaking frequently calls to mind a doctoral candidate delivering a wobbly dissertation defense.

Hey, Meghan, you poor tool. A doctoral candidate who delivers a wobbly dissertation defense is not being wobbly because he's an intellectual. I gave a smooth, polished, dissertation that was funny and described by some on the committee as the way a dissertation defense should be done. And I had only one run through just minutes before the presentation. The wobbler is wobbly because he's unprepared and unpracticed and unable to do a good job. Just like Barry, the stuttering dolt, Obama. He's not even a gifted BS-er. Those guys can make it look like they really know what they're talking about. Barry, on the other hand, doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. The only difference between his on-teleprompter and off-teleprompter remarks is the illusion, provided by the teleprompter, that there's an intellect at work producing intelligible sentences. Removing the teleprompter simple removes the crutch that reveals in full extremity the mental cripple and ideological miscarriage that is Barry Obama.

[aruanan]

That's kind of ironic, given that the godfather of the intellectual stammer is arguably none other than the paterfamilias of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr.

The difference between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Barry Obama is the difference between a wonderful souffle and a rotten buzzard egg pushed out of the nest. Buckley didn't learn English until about 10 years of age. And who knows what Barry was jabbering as a result of being carted around so much during his formative years and his care by an Indonesian transvestite nanny followed by his "mentoring" by Frank Marshall Davis. Still, Buckley, despite learning English as as second language, could make an intellectual point that skewered unlike Barry whose "intellectual stammer" finally kicks up "inhalator" to replace "breathalyzer" in the search for "inhaler." Even dead, Buckley could out-debate Obama.