If you read Charles Krauthammer’s columns, do you ever find yourself stopping in the midst of them to go back and reread a paragraph you’ve just read because it is so informative or persuasive or beautifully crafted or all those things?
I do; sometimes three or four times with one column.
Yesterday I stopped after reading the first paragraph of A Man of Seasonal Principles and reread it twice. Here it is, followed by my comments below the star line:
You'll notice Barack Obama is now wearing a flag pin. Again. During the primary campaign, he refused to, explaining that he'd worn one after Sept. 11 but then stopped because it "became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism." So why is he back to sporting pseudo-patriotism on his chest? Need you ask? The primaries are over. While seducing the hard-core MoveOn Democrats that delivered him the caucuses -- hence, the Democratic nomination -- Obama not only disdained the pin. He disparaged it. Now that he's running in a general election against John McCain, and in dire need of the gun-and-God-clinging working-class votes he could not win against Hillary Clinton, the pin is back. His country 'tis of thee.
The entire column’s here.
****************************************************************Comments:
What do you think of the paragraph as a stand-alone essay? Doesn’t Krauthammer capture the essence of Obama? Does he waste a word? Is there a better word than “seducing” for what Obama spent the last year doing to hard-core MoveOn Democrats? And ending the paragraph with "His country 'tis of thee" on the Fourth of July?
3 comments:
Strange, The only person to define Obama better than Charles is the Rev. Wright. "He is just a politician". 5 words.
JimB
John: Somewhat OT, but check out the editorial in The Washington Times of July 5, 2008: Anti-American Bias. I'd email it to you, but don't know how that's done in a blog.
Tarheel Hawkeye
Off-Topic
John,
Yesterday I learned of some seemingly important journalism distinctions.
Paper media, is of course part of the old MSM. (Dinosaur media)
When referring to newspapers, magazines, and books, the blogosphere prefers to them "affectionately" as the, "dead tree" media. I had heard the term, but I did not realize it is commonly used.
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Blogger: ‘havecoffeewillwrite.com’ made some humors remarks:
“Dead-tree media have a space problem. This is the just one of the many reasons why dead-tree media don’t like blogs.
We don’t have to restrict the number of comments we publish. We don’t have to edit for space, logic, grammatical accuracy (hell, some of us do a lousy job of that on our own posts) or brevity. Brevity? Brevity! We don’t need no stinkin’ brevity!”
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‘Dead Tree’ is probably not part of the
J-jargon used at the N & O, of course!
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