I’m glad I read through this to the end, because the writer gets around to mentioning that Obama kept referring to him
as “Danny”, which made me positively YELP with pain when I heard it, and yelled to my wife in the kitchen, “NO! He just called him “Danny!”, just like he referred to Gabriel Giffords as “Gabby”, and worst of all, Neil Armstrong as
“Neil”-—not so much as if he were good buddies with all of them for a very long time,(NOBODY would accept that) but as a way of expropriating anyone else’s legitimate familiarity with these individuals
and suggest that he “got there first”, or was at least right alongside them. See, he’s Obama, the vehicle through which
we can channel our collective respect, just as he slyly back-channels respect for him through us.
The rancid depths of his insincerity are positively bottomless.
But, it was good to see, at least someone at SLATE gets it,
albeit waaaaaayy too late.
Good post.