January 28, 2011
ON SECOND THOUGHT, IT IS A GOOD METAPHOR....:
An Unserious Speech Misses the Mark: The audience found it tiresome. Here's why it was irksome as well. (PEGGY NOONAN, 1/28/11, WSJ)
The State of the Union speech was not centrist, as it should have been, but merely mushy, and barely relevant. It wasted a perfectly good analogy—America is in a Sputnik moment—by following it with narrow, redundant and essentially meaningless initiatives. Rhetorically the speech lay there like a lox, as if the document itself knew it was dishonest, felt embarrassed, and wanted to curl up quietly in a corner of the podium and hide. But the president insisted on reading it.
...when you consider that the USSR used the know-how of others, the Germans, to produce an unwarranted hysteria in America about our decline relative to a system that was achieving nothing as it headed towards inevitable collapse while we went from strength to strength.
