"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Friday, June 21, 2013

Mark Steyn on Obama's Brandenburg Gate Speech

Mark Steyn also weighed in yesterday on Obama's tired speech in Germany this week:

It’s interesting to see that even liberal German media actually thought the President was a total flop. He’s a very boring man, by the way. I think that’s what’s so fascinating about him. When you listen to him chugging on about climate change or whatever, or a nuclear-free world, he’s got the same vapid ideas as the emptiest Hollywood dinner party. He’s like the guy who got a best supporting actor nomination in 1978 who’s name you can’t quite place, and he’s sitting down the end of Barbra Streisand’s dinner party just mouthing the same old boring platitudes. He hasn’t got an interesting idea in his head, this guy. And the Germans have figured it out.
 
This reminds me of something I wrote maybe a couple of years ago about Obama:
 
Obama reminds me of the character played by Charles Grodin in the original version of The Heartbreak Kid back in the early 1970s. At the end of the movie, when he's finally married the shiksa goddess played by Cybill Shepherd, he's at their wedding reception and the scene starts off with him telling a group of adults what he wants to do with his life. He wants to "help people," or words to that effect, typical content-free, skills-free liberal do-gooderism. Over the course of the wedding reception (this is the final scene of the movie), he keeps repeating this mantra to gradually descending groups of people, until, at the end of the movie, he's telling his story of wanting to "help people" to a group of children, with the implication that they are the only ones left who'll take him seriously. Meanwhile, Shepherd and her father look at him with the dawning realization that he's a schlub. It's an absolutely killer scene in a movie that was much much better than the later, Ben Stiller version.

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