Thursday, June 04, 2009

No doubt they will be Unquestionably Called “Fine Words”

Obama’s speech in Cairo will be declared an uncritical success. The only way that the press would find the awkward message a failure is by merely reporting it without much commentary. That’s just the way they are with the left. BBC filleted if for the tips that they prefer, and to be sure Al-Jazeera will do the same, but one thing they will never ever say is the obvious: it will be a flop with the potential audiences that matter.

To begin with, it will appeal greatly to the same passive mass in the Arab and Muslim world that tacitly oppose Jihad, but don’t say so. There is no evidence to suggest that they will treat this clumsy sort of “community outreach” the same way.

In spite of the fact that the Iranian leadership released a vengeful statement to undercut any potential rise in America’s popularity in Iran, they do that with a lot of things. To the BBC though, a press release like that is news that fits the bill and the editorial line – the construction of Obama as the brave and serious statesman that he really isn’t. To be sure, he isn’t a bad manager, but the passion held for him is growing to be limited the strange lionizing images in caps and t-shirts being sold by street vendors.

Now that their favorite American is actually presenting himself to the larger world, there might be shreds here and there of content to satisfy the hype created by the world press, and they have no choice but to run with it, else they prove their biased reporting biased. This maljournalisme, they must do to sustain their credibility with an audience whom they promised so much.

Otherwise there are still fragments of a vulgar narrative to be found in his speech, fragments of the scattered previous “international statements” which did more to confirm though apology the years of specious over-the-top howlings that the United States, which is not a religion, was somehow waging war with a religion, even though those targeting American civilians at every opportunity were fighting a religious war with the rest of humanity.

The tone of the reconciliatory message Barack Obama is trying to transmit to the proponent will look like little more than pandering, because unlike the message George Bush repeated as a proponent of human rights (one which the press in their own “humanism” tried to undercut at the expense of humanity,) it’s hard to tell if Obama, trapped in a complex of his own electors, would do anything for human rights beyond symbolism, maintaining appearances, and writing the occasional check. Obama’s entire administration is taking forever to form itself seriously and one wonders if it capable of strategic thinking at all.

Oddly enough, it doesn’t take long to find that the talking heads and the press worldwide find that their egos and ids simply love an incapacitated and ineffectual White House that can do little more than purvey an image that pleases them. The very reason it didn’t take long for them to go from passive-aggressive but vivid irrational haters of America to be in near permanent thrall of Obama is that it was a very short intellectual leap. They finally got the globally incapable (read: stupid, naïve, with a narrow political view) president they accuse us of having so long as it’s not a leftist, and they need to promote him as fast as they can dance to try and keep him there.

So a forgettable and awkward speech full of pandering to a imagined frame of culture has to be raised in profile, just as his roundabout apologies confirm to an mendacious accusatory terror-supporting subculture their world view. To our own rather silent tacitly terror-supporting subculture in the cultural elite and the press, this must be to confirm their delusions about America, and try to fix for them a place of influence in the world. The best that we can hope for is that those collaborationists to the lefty elite in our own society are undermined by hearing what they want to, permitting the White House in future to at least do something effectual.

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