Pause for Laughter and Prosper
It is startling, the degree to which President Obama manages to be pitch-perfect all the time (OK, almost.) Even with great writers, his delivery at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, linked to above, is impossibly adept. Compare this with professional comic Wanda Sykes’s sharp-intake-of-breath-inducing material. If Bush’s slide-show of his failing to find WMDs under tables and behind furniture was nauseating at the time, it is even more stark and hideous when compared to our current President’s remarks.
So while I laughed at the President’s self-effacing lines (”In the next 100 days, I will strongly consider losing my cool”), I thought the point would be over-stretched in Salon’s Obama is Spock — Salon just being Salon. And while I found the article, at times, wince-inducing with its metaphors, it is hard to resist an article that quotes a famous MIT figure that both are people who can “bitch slap you with [their] brain[s]“, Obama himself as saying “Issues are never simple“, and (OK, this one is pretty sketchy) a comparison of the Obama cabinet to the Enterprise crew. Read (or plod) through it, though: the payoff involves Leonard Nimoy, a sardonically-Vulcan observation, and a certain famous split-fingered gesture.
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