President Obama’s Soaring State of the Union Cynicism — Matches Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s — These Two Men Symbolize Our Narcissistically Destructive Age

© 2015 Peter Free

 

22 January 2015

 

 

Rhetoric for a low purpose

 

William Rivers Pitt wrote of 2015’s State of the Union speech (see transcript, here):

 

 

It was a fine speech, one of the best of President Obama's political career, which makes it automatically one of the best in the State of the Union's august history.

 

It was a fine show . . . a masterful performance, and a comprehensive waste of time.

 

[T]here is the stone-cold fact that absolutely none of the progressive ideas President Obama proposed on Tuesday night have the vaguest chance of seeing daylight in this new GOP-dominated congress...which begs the question:

 

Why did he wait until now - when everything he proposed was demonstrably doomed before the words even passed his teeth - to uncork the kind of rhetoric so many of his voters have been waiting for?

 

Was it to poke a stick in the eye of this new assemblage?

 

Perhaps to lay some rhetorical groundwork for the 2016 presidential race?

 

Or did he never mean any of it in the first place, and said it on Tuesday night secure in the fact that none of it would ever come to pass?

 

© 2015 William Rivers Pitt, Twenty Pounds of BS in a Ten-Pound Bag, TruthOut (21 January 2015) (extracts)

 

 

Each of Pitt’s questions answers itself

 

We recognize that the President’s outlook on power and personal status matches Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s — whose self-announced sole purpose, since the President’s arrival in office, has been to create circumstances in which the Commander in Chief and his Democrats would fail in each election from then through 2016.

 

President Obama’s State of the Union yak-a-thon was about misleading the democratically inclined public into thinking (for 2016) that he and his Party give a darn about them. When, in fact, the President expanded and deepened every major anti-democratic trend that his predecessors had implemented.

 

These two men are nearly exclusively about manipulatively preserving their tribe’s portion of oligarchically held, plutocratic power.

 

 

Sadly — for both History and the continued viability of our republican democracy

 

We the People are too kindly, too forgetful, and sometimes too thoughtlessly stupid to fully recognize the repellant ethical baseness of both men’s professional souls.

 

 

The moral? — These two supremely influential leaders are exquisitely emblematic of our Age

 

President and Senator are forever entwined in a Machiavellian dance to nowhere. A waste of high intelligence and superb political skill.

 

Had these “Horses of the Sun” been of better principled pedigree, they might have pulled the United States out of the mire that it is bogged in. Instead, they hauled the other way.

 

I suppose we get what we pay for. Levels of meaning intended.