And if you don’t like the way he talks, it’s because you’re dumb. There — I’ve just given you a shorter Meghan Daum.
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.
But consider this: It’s not that Obama can’t speak clearly. It’s that he employs the intellectual stammer. 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; in fact, you might even love him for it (he sounds just like your grad school roommate, especially when he drank too much Scotch whisky and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic!).
If you’re not, chances are you find yourself yelling, “Get to the point already!” at the television screen every time Obama’s search for the right word seems to last longer than the search for Osama bin Laden. And thanks to its echoes of the college lecture hall, you may think it comes across as ever so slightly (or more than slightly) left wing.
So it’s not his actual policies that are left wing; once again, it’s everyone else’s fault. And our president is a Woody Allen character? The leader of the free world is an incompetent neurotic who talks too much? I think Meghan Daum has accidentally found a truth in that one.
But riddle me this, Meghan Daum. If Obama is so brilliant, why does he pronounce the “p” in corpsman? Why does he give a tectonic shift a distinctly Germanic twist? What was up with that whole “57 states” thing? Why, even in his prepared remarks, does your boyfriend make hash out of longstanding US policy on the MidEast? Why did that WH meeting between Obama and Netanyahu come off like the Israeli PM was schooling President Obama, who was physically shrinking during the exchange? Why does everything Obama touches turn to crap? And why does he only sound like he knows what he’s talking about when he’s reading words off a screen, that were written by others?
Oh, I know — he’s too smart for his own mouth. Right.
If he’s so gosh darned smart then why are his academic records sealed?
Show, don’t tell.
The more I read of this stuff the more like Chauncey Gardner he sounds (an evil Chauncey, that is).
It’s true enough that some people have an intellectual stammer; stammering and awkwardly pausing your way through conversations isn’t necessarily the sign of stupidity. But you can tell the pause is an intellectual stammer by listening to what follows. If it’s eloquent and wise, then, yes, the pause was an intellectual stammer.
However, if what follows the pause is just more empty, cliche-riddled talking points, then you can rest assured that the pause was NOT an intellectual stammer.
William F. Buckley had an intellectual stammer, pausing while his sharp mind searched for the perfect word or phrase to illustrate his whirring thoughts.
O’bomba? Not so much.
But the left will attempt to peddle these lame explanations for Barry’s shortcomings because they have to. You see, they’ve spent the last four years telling us how brilliant he is. And when most of us didn’t know much about him or hadn’t heard much of his speeches (and none of his off-the-cuff remarks), they could get away with the lie.
But we’ve had three years of him babbling his way through unscripted answers, to the point it’s clear that he really isn’t anything above average intelligence. Yes, he possesses a certain amount of native cunning, but intelligence? Not really… He’s no Einstein. He’s certainly no Buckley. I’m pretty sure he’s not even a Palin…
But, you see, the left — being made up of people who congratulate themselves on how superior they are to the rest of us — have invested quite a bit in the notion that Barry O is the smartest. Man. EVAH.
They crowed it during the campaign, citing his TWO — count ‘em, TWO — autobiographies as proof. No SAT scores. No grades. No essays, theses, or dissertations. Just two (as we’ve learned since ghostwritten) biographies of a man who’s accomplished very little of any great import in his entire life.
Oh, he hung out with the rebellious kids at school. Smoked weed and snorted coke. And apparently idolized the socialist father who left him and his mother when Barry was still in diapers.
All this is supposed to impress us somehow?
But, see… the leftists have painted themselves into a corner. They’ve spent all this time telling us he’s soooooo smart, without any proof. Now that the rest of us can plainly see that he really isn’t, they have to keep peddling the lie, lest they be forced to admit that they really aren’t nearly as bright as they’ve believed either.
The rest of us knew exactly what Barry was all along: a black who used his color to move up the affirmative action ladder. So if we — the uneducated rubes in flyover country — saw him for what he was and weren’t fooled, then what does that mean those lefties are?
Kinda makes them look stupid by extension, doesn’t it? So they have to convince us we’re just too stupid to appreciate his brilliance. The man’s so brilliant, in fact, that even his mouth can’t keep up.
The more they spin, the funnier the joke that’s been played on them…
What Elaine said.
Instead of a teleprompter coach, perhaps the Prez could benefit from a speech therapist. I always thought his awkward pauses were times when he would have said “um”, “uh” or “yeah”. Who knows? Maybe there is a BS meter on everyone and when he gets to his limit he has to pause so he doesn’t laugh.
He doesn’t even know what year it is!
And you even left out his linguistic talents – Austrian language, anyone?
Comparing Obama with a university teacher is an offense to all university teachers
So we’re supposed to be impressed with the stammering while the stammerer has:
1) Left the American economy in shambles
2) Taken us to our third war
3) Left Afghanistan with a record death toll
4) Given us $14 trillion in deficits
5) Allowed the public pension fund to be raided to avoid the debt ceiling
6) Left the Southern border unguarded
7) Committed numerous foreign policy disasters
8) Left his own Democrat Party in ruins after losing 800+ seats in November
9) Set a record for the number of golf games played by a President
10) Sat idly by while 1 in 4 mortgages go under water
I can easily give ten more examples. To heck with his stammering, he just needs to go away.
I kind of liked the fact that number eight in the list above was confused for a smiley. I smiled when I saw the good news in November too.
He’s brain is faster than his mouth.
My wife’s checkbook is also faster than the funds in my bank account.
I can relate.
8) #9 “His brain” — forgive the typo… I need to get some rest…
I always laugh when I come across articles like this and hear people make these types of comments or theories about why Obama isn’t fully understood, or gets his thoughts properly across to us. As if this guy descended from heaven, and we poor small-minded people just need to speed out own brains up in order to bask in his glow. Look: the simplest reason is usually the correct one … Obama talks and thinks the way that he does because he’s intellectually dishonest, morally questionable, and couldn’t work an actual day in his life if his life depended on it – or gain any real-life traction from what normal people learn in the course of a real life, with its’ ups and downs. He’s not like the rest of us because he’s done everything in his power throughout his life to avoid, obfuscate, and shrink from things like principles, responsibilities, the benefits of a hard day’s work, learning to get along with and listen to others, and learning about what it really means to be a man in 21st-century America.
If you’re the President of the United States, and you won’t even allow things like letting your fellow citizens view your academic records so that they can learn all they need to know about the person who is their President, then you’re missing the point of it all … and should be consigned to working the frozen yogurt machine at the local Dairy Queen. At least then, the decisions you make for people won’t have lasting consequences.
Keep in mind that it is not just Obama’s policies. He is supported and cheered by almost all Democrats in the House and Senate. They are just as ideological as Obama, and just as ignorant of real analysis. Obama could not be making his current mistakes and following his current rediculous policies without their support.
…”Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have…”
Go to YouTube, search “Obama stutter”. You will find a whole page of video after video of him stuttering. Letterman even does a routine on it.
Of course! Because only the intellectually superior have to read their toast to the Queen of England from notecards.
Yes, so eloquent!
If his stammering is a sign of his intellectual greatness what does his whistling every second word say about him? I guess we’ll have to wait for next week’s LA Times op-ed to enlighten further. I’m guessing Jeremiah was his elocution teacher as well..
If he is so smart, why can’t his super intelligence tell himself to slow down? Shenanigans.
It always leaves me cold, hearing all about how gosh-darn smart someone is, when their own words and deeds give the lie to the fact.
He’s not brilliant, he is glib. Major difference.
(emphasis added by me)
He’s not even glib! Just watch him speak sometimes without TOTUS in front of him.
You do have a point. Though the other descriptives do apply: thoughtless, superficial, and insincere.
When he begins to speak, I keep wanting to check and make certain my wallet is still there.
What P-BO is, IMHO, is nothing more than a well-trained parrot or well-programmed robot. He’s assimilated (and I use that term deliberately) all the answers that the lefties think are correct–note, I didn’t say they’re really the correct answers–and repeats them as needed.
It’s when you get beyond the scripted answers that Parrot Obama starts to show his true self, and that true self, I submit, isn’t even of average intelligence… and I speak as one who has, in the past, taught others, so I have some experience with judging intellect.
This is an example of attempting to validate your own intellectual smarts by proxy, which goes at least back to the dawn of the TV era and the Eisenhower-Stevenson campaign in 1952.
For liberals, every candidate they put up (unless it’s a vice-president trying to replace an incumbent, as in 2000) has to be not just smart, but the smartest, the wisest, the more on top of all details president in the history of the Republic, while their default position on whomever the Republicans put up is that he’s a moron (if it’s obvious that line won’t fly with voters, then they fall back to the “evil Republican” spin). And if their candidate gets elected and then runs into trouble, they don’t just see it as an attack on him, it’s also an attack on their own intellectualism.
When Bill Clinton was in trouble in April of 1994, a unidentified White House spokesperson went out and lectured the Associated Press that Clinton was “the smartest president since Thomas Jefferson.” Daum’s polemic falls into the same category — the people criticizing her man don’t realize that he’s so darned smart, it’s amazing he doesn’t have a cranium that looks like one of the Talosian on “Star Trek” because his brain’s so gigantic (Hillary had a gianormous brain, too, from about 1992 to 2005, when it shrank in size in the eyes of the left because she initially supported the War on Terror).
If Obama’s an idiot, Daum feels that makes her at least a fool for voting for him. So he has to be a genius and his critics befuddled rabble who, unlike Meghan, just aren’t smart enough to comprehend that what appear to be bugs in his intellect are actually features of his amazing mind powers.
Excellent points, all.
Don’t think I’ve seen you commenting around here before… welcome to the nuttiness!
Great point!
FYI: There may not be 57 states but there are 57 Muslim countries in the United Nations. Gee, could things like this lead people to believe that Obama is a Muslim?
Obama can’t possibly be a Muslim.
To be a Muslim… or a Christian for that matter… requires one to believe in a being of greater wisdom, intelligence, power, and authority than one’s self.
Obama could never believe such a thing. He is, in his own narcissistic mind, the be-all and end-all of existence.
QED.
Just for fun…the next time you go to a cocktail party, a convention, any group or large gathering where there are people you don’t know very well, or even better…a group you may not like that much.
Go up to one of the ones you don’t really respect and try to make small talk with them.
The test here, is to talk (not listen) for five minutes or more straight to a person you do not like and do not respect, about a subject you do not care one whit about, and for which you have no passion.
Here’s what will happen. Your brain will shut down repeatedly. You will, at the end of this little test…be stammering like you are having an ischemic event. Your mind will be so disengaged from your mouth, it will feel as if they are attached to different people.
96% of you will realize that you don’t want to be there, don’t want to be spewing any more B.S., don’t believe your own B.S. You will have then walked in Obama’s shoes during those moments of sputtering imbecility.
The other 4% of you will be accomplished liars. You will have walked in Obama’s shoes that he wears the rest of the time.
Kinda like talking to my ex? Well, I learned how to not tune out or stutter. I make pleasant noises and just let her talk. I never got to the stammering part. Sorry, cf, don’t think it’ll work for me.
Awww.
I can’t wait to see what this person thinks of Sarah Palin’s eliptical speech pattern, which I find strikingly similar to that of George H.W. Bush.
I like Palin, but you are right about her speech habits. She and Bush sound a lot like the average man on the street in their speech styles. It’s a conversational style, not an oratorical one. Still, Palin always seems to be spot on in her points, even if the delivery lacks. Listen to her speeches, which she helps write, and you will see the difference. They are clear and spot on. Stupid she ain’t, nor is she ignorant.
Obama stammers because he is buying time to present a way to spin his worldview, to lie. He cannot say what he really thinks, or he gets in trouble. He ain’t stupid, either. He is malevolent. And ignorant.
Aha. Here is Megan dummy on Sarah Palin
http://www.meghandaum.com/2011-la-times-column/348-why-sarah-palin-doesnt-get-what-she-deserves
“…a speaking style that often collapses under the weight of disjointed, undiagrammable sentences…”
So BO’s bad extemporaneous speaking habits show he is smart, and Palin’s, which resemble those of the undeniably intelligent George H.W. Bush, show she is dumb.
At least Sarah Palin knows enough to educate herself on the subject matter she addresses. Take, for example, that Arizona Immigration law. Her public remarks showed that she bothered to get hold of the correct text, unlike BO, his Attorney General, and a certain law perfesser writing for the New York Times.
Oh, I believe.
This woman obviously is educated, but also ignorant. She asserts any number of negative things about Palin in her article, but offers no substance to support her assertions. She says she is trying to not punch below here weight, not tear Palin to shreds. Really? So, unsubstantiated commentary, basic bitchiness, is not tearing someone to shreds?
She quotes Couric who “tried to be as fair-minded as possible” during the interview. Really? Like asking her what she reads? (Translation: Can you read?) Couric is not exactly a brainchild, as evinced by her interview with Biden.
This is another self-referential article from the same people on the Left. Well, everyone just knooows…. It’s a consensus. It is settled.
I notice they never dissect her policy positions. They do not review her white paper on energy. They do not review the success or failure of her overseas trips. They do not review her speech in Hong Kong to big-wig Asian businessman. They do not do this, because they cannot disparage these things effectively. So, they just resort to calling her stupid as many ways as they can.
Two common lies being foisted off on the American people. 1) Obama is brilliant. 2) Moochelle is a beautiful fashion icon. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Aren’t those great jokes????
The left does not have politicians, but Demigods. They do not support candidates, but rather deify them.
Meghan Daum’s skull is too darn hollow to house a brain.