Free Republic

And Obama Wept February 07, 2008 9:43 AM Inspiration is nice. But some folks seem to be getting out of hand. It's as if Tom Daschle descended from on high saying, "Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of Chicago a Savior, who is Barack the Democrat." Obama supporter Kathleen Geier writes that she's "getting increasingly weirded out by some of Obama's supporters. On listservs I'm on, some people who should know better – hard-bitten, not-so-young...

"Sen. Barack Obama, right, claps hands with his grandmother, Sarah Hussein Obama, at his father's house in Nyongoma Kogelo village, in western Kenya, in this Aug. 26, 2006 file photo. Obama's two years in the Senate have taken him around the world, from Russia to Iraq to Kenya - a travel itinerary more ambitious and more costly than any other senator who took office with him. (AP Photo/Sayyid Azim, File)"

HERE'S IRONY for you. Last spring, focus-group guru Frank Luntz said that Sen. Joseph Biden should be considered a front-runner in the Democratic Presidential primaries because so many Democrats in New Hampshire and Iowa judged him to be -- wait for it -- "articulate." I should back up. Biden is famous for his brain's chronic inability to hold brake fluid. Once he revs his engines, the motormouth can't be stopped, and he just keeps talking and talking and talking. My theory is that those constant smiles where he displays his shiny fake teeth are the facial equivalent of flashing your...

“Politics has become so bitter and partisan,” Senator Barack Obama said, “so gummed up by money and influence. . . .” Though the rest of his sentence petered out into a bureaucratic “big problems that demand solutions,” what struck me was the forceful word picture evoked by the verb phrase gummed up. Here was a presidential candidate unafraid to use a slang verb with verve. It’s an Americanism in the sense of “spoiled,” first cited by the O.E.D. in the college slang at Yale in 1901. Rudyard Kipling helped it along to trans-Atlantic status with a pregnant observation in a...