Programing Note/Need Some Air
June 22nd, 2011 - 9:33 am
I’ll drunkblog the President’s Afghanistan speech tonight, starting at about 7:45PM Eastern. Before that, I’ll tape 30 minutes on the Ed Morrissey Show. And right now I have four Trifectas to tape.
Links to follow, of course.
Finally new Trifecta episodes! I was suffering Trifecta withdrawal syndrome. Almost as bad as caffeine withdrawal…
I have to ask the most obvious question:
“Why”?
I mean, you can write this speech now! You know what he is going to say, you know why he is going to say it and you even know what his spin-mechanics will say about what he says after he says it. In 5 other Alternate Universes and Timespace continuums, this speech has already happened, an no one in any alternate universe cared much what he had to say either, including the one where our POTUS actually delivered.
My Prediction: By Saturday, no one will remember a single thing that was said in this speech.
No.One.
Why not cut out the middle-man and give the world 2 hours of wasted time back to watch “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” on Netflix and marvel at the sublime magnificence of Barbara Eden in a pencil skirt? That is something that almost everyone would still remember by Saturday.
Unless you watch it wearing welding goggles and a lead X-Ray technician apron, this speech will actually make you dumber just by sitting there and watching it. If TV Remotes had “dead man switches” to turn off the screen if you fall asleep, the entire nation would note a surprising uptick in electrical supply on the grid just 5 minutes into the start of this speech.
The only possible value of this speech is to dull the voting populace into a wide-scale monumental drool-enducing coma, where Democrat operatives would be allowed to scurry about the country setting clocks and calendars up three years; allowing them to silently update wikipedia to declare that its really 2013 and Barack Obama will have been said to have won his second term in a landslide against John Huntsman. Every state, and every county (except one in utah where everyone has the last name “Hunstman”) will be shown to vote for Barack Obama.
And the last thing you will remember will be POTUS droning on about something in 2011.
Seriously Steve, hes not going to pull an LBJ and announce that he’s not running, he’s just going to say the most obvious things in the most bland way he can, so that no matter how things turn out later, he can take credit for “showing leadership”, or “statesmanship” or oh hell whatever he wants it to be.
There is nothing so contemptuous of the American voting public than the POTUS making a speech in prime time about something as completely useless as “The Presidents Afghanistan Policy” (Ok, except maybe to say something about “Energy Policy” or “Environmental Studies” or “College for everyone!”). We don’t care what he says and he doesn’t care what we have to say about it. Hell, even the Afghans don’t care what he says about Afghanistan, so Why-Do-You?.
He cant leave because he doesn’t want to be tagged as “the man who lost Afghanistan” so he wont leave and he cant stay because, well, that would be another example of “American Hegemony and Empire, blah blah blah” you know whatever they say at the Harvard Student Body Alumni meetings, where everyone sounds like Gore Vidal and Robert Fisk on a three week bender in Managua Nicaragua in 1981.
Basically his strategy is to tell everyone in uniform in Afghanistan with a last name between A-F now goes home, but members in the military with a name between G-L will be forced to stay in Afghanistan an additional 6 months. Thomas Friedman will call it the “So smart, you wished you would have thought of it first” withdrawal strategy.
Captain Yossarian, sitting in a rest home in Yonkers NY with his TV Tray in front of him, will leap to his feet and exclaim:
“See! I told ya!”
So I ask you, “Just exactly who is he making this speech for?”
Me? You? Who Exactly?
because damn if I can figure that out.
(…Hey, why not create a sort of “pointless-speech-bingo” game, where you put the most likely POTUS speechifying foriegn policy cliches under the B-I-N-G-O columns, and the first person to note all of them in a row wins a small bottle of Grey Goose. )