Alvin Felzenberg, writing at US News & World Report, has a scathing deconstruction of all the lifted lines, stolen ideas and borrowed themes that Obama used in the SOTU address last night. He calls the speech tantamount to plagiarism:
Early in his address, Obama said that he wanted the nation he leads to be a “light to the world.” The last president who set such a mission for the nation he led, and in those exact words, was Woodrow Wilson.
Obama’s concept of the “American family” may well have had its origins in the first State of the State address New York Governor Mario Cuomo delivered in 1983. Cuomo proclaimed the state of New York as a “family.” He also talked about multiple partnerships, both public and private.
In an address to the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990, Margaret Thatcher delivered what might go down as the most memorable line in Obama’s second State of the Union address. The British Prime Minister told her American audience that the United States was the “first nation to have been founded on an idea.” It took the president a few additional words to get this idea across.
Obama’s pointed mutterings about a second “Sputnik Moment” being upon us and his recollection of how American policymakers responded to the last one with increased expenditures on infrastructure, science, technology, and education were clearly intended to evoke the spirit of Dwight D. Eisenhower. His setting of specific deadlines and goals was vintage JFK, but for the absence of any sense of challenge to his audience, list of benefits the United States would derive from them, or any semblance of a shared adventure the American people were about to embark upon. [Read Robert Schlesinger: Obama Not the First to Use 'Sputnik Moment.']
There is a lot – a really lot – more. (Interestingly, this is a completely different list from the earlier post I did on the themes lifted – whole – from epic fail Jennifer Granholm.)
Felzenberg’s advice is for Obama’s speechwriters (the mind-meld boy wonder) to throw away their books of famous quotations.
Let’s hear the won’s own words, not the recycled content of other, (sometimes) better, thinkers and not words reclaimed from Bartlett’s by the frat boys in the back office.
Via Memeorandum
Enough already with the love of snipping at things of little consequence. The truth is if everyone wants to keep the United States in the forefront then it is clear that the we must own our future and find the way to do the correct things and not the ideological ones. Neither “sides” approach to the problems are entire wrong NOR entirely correct. They have evolved over decades as responses to each others political posturing. Worse the posturing was never met with actual actions as the evolved, so now we have extreme ideas posturing for emotional votes and the actions required to support them being dangerous for the country. Not only dangerous but irresponsible.
The longer we attack the vehicles and ignore the logic and facts of the problems the faster I fear we will all fall. I for one do not wish to win the argument and then at the same time fail to do the right things.
“Let’s hear the won’s own words, …”
Like that’ll ever happen, unless TOTUS dies, and he’s left alone, unscripted, at the podium.