SOTU – What the Pundits Heard

Foolishly, President Obama invoked the outdated Democratic and slavishly-obeyed Republican  ”I got your back,” meme.

The Republicans looked up for a moment from their blood feast and half-remembered their “Eleventh Commandment” (NOT created by Ronald Reagan) while the Democratic pundits, afflicted with ADD, misheard the President’s words as “I got your backBITING!”

Clearly, I must have a different sort of radio than the punditocracy owns. I say that because what I heard in last night’s State of the Union speech was clearly completely different than what anyone else heard. And, since, in the face of such a bipartisan and universal snarking, I clearly must have heard wrong.

So, rather than bore the reader with my inaccurate and obviously incorrect impressions,  I should much prefer to highlight the deep thoughts of my betters in the Punditocracy. 

I begin with Andrew Sullivan, the angry British import who only broke with the GOP when he finally decided that George W. Bush had maybe wrecked the country and realized how much the Republicans disagreed with his very right to exist. Now, as a “born again” liberal who has changed few of his opinions, he’s really the best place to start:

I was hoping for a vision. I was hoping for real, strategic reform. What we got was one big blizzard of tax deductions, wrapped in a populist cloak. It was treading water.

Speaking of British transplantation, the Guardian (UK) lines up an American panel (excerpted):

President Obama’s state of the union speech: panel verdict

Measuring their hopes and expectations against what the president actually said, our commentators give their views
Jose Antonio Vargas, Jane Eisner, Jim Geraghty, DeeDee Garcia Blase, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sarahi Uribe and Mark Weisbrot guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 January 2012 12.30 EST

Weisbrot: To understand President Obama’s state of the union speech, you have to understand his political strategy. From the beginning of his 2008 campaign, his main constituency has always been the major media.

Uribe: In a few short sentences, the president displayed an unavoidable gap between his rhetoric and the reality of his actions on immigration.

Slaughter: He did not mention the unshakeable US commitment to security of Israel in the context either of the Arab awakening or of the threat from Iran, but rather with regard to the strengthening of America’s global alliances. The administration, abroad as at home, has cast its lot with change.

Garcia Blase: It is now up to Latinos to up the ante. We must provide political cover to all immigrant-friendly politicians during the 2012 elections in key high Hispanic populated states where Latin political leverage is best.

Wiltz: By the end, he was practically singing Kumbaya in a “can’t we all get along?” moment, describing how the Seals who took down bin Laden could only do it because they knew they had each other’s back.

Geraghty (National Review Online): The folks here and abroad who dismissed George W Bush as an ignorant warmonger will probably unthinkingly applaud a Democratic president urging the nation to emulate, as a role model of unity, a group of men who, operating in secret, will ruthlessly and skillfully kill for him.

Eisner: By my clock, it took him nearly an hour to broach foreign affairs, offering no surprises as he sped through the list of necessary subjects.

Vargas: We’ve heard this before. Overhauling immigration was one of Obama’s top priorities upon arriving in the White House. He has not delivered. Nor has Congress. Immigration, yet again, becomes another campaign issue.

Ah, can you smell the aroma of punditocracy?

Here’s the Most Original Snark from the Moron side of the Family Feud panel:

“My Message is Simple”: Obama’s SOTU Written at 8th Grade Level for Third Straight Year
By Eric Ostermeier on January 25, 2012

Obama’s SOTU addresses have the lowest average Flesch-Kincaid score of any modern president; Obama owns three of the six lowest-scoring addresses since FDR For the third consecutive State of the Union Address, Barack Obama spoke in clear, plain terms. And for the third straight Address, the President’s speech was written at an eighth-grade level. In Obama’s own words: “My message is simple.” But was it too simplistic?

A Smart Politics study of the 70 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since 1934 finds the text of Obama’s 2012 speech to have tallied the third lowest score on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, at an 8.4 grade level….

A lack of cognitively ephemeral intellectual ostentation?! Oh noes!

So, President Obama is … dumb?

Let me tell you a little story: At HUSTLER — for which I was an editor when I was 23 years old — we used something called “dumb guy proofing.”

Which mean, it had to be readable by someone with a ninth grade education.

Now, I’ve told this story before, but the short version is this: my May 1980 cover story on Herpes predated TIME magazine’s shameful August 1982 cover story (and cover) on Herpes (Today’s Scarlet Letter!), but, while TIMEwas pretentious and alarmist from the git-go — the cover presumes a vague knowledge of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of Puritan morality and adultery — my ninth grade level tale was reviewed by a Master’s candidate in Public Health Nursing at the University of New Mexico in 1990, who thought that, with ONE minor change in future FDA (f0r 1980) drug approvals, it was still current, still valuable and still gave good advice.

August 2, 1982

The same cannot be said of the TIME story*, which focused on fear and alarm, and not on the Prime Directive of Public Health Medicine: First, cause no panic.

[* Co-written by Maureen Dowd, now a columnist at the New York Times. It was TIME's Best-Selling issue of 1982.]

But the TIME tale was written to a college level and my poor piece was written at a ninth-grade level — even though I interviewed mucky-mucks at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and Harvard Medical School. And HUSTLER is still doing fine with the “public” that can only read comfortably at a ninth grade level. Still, Ann Althouse quitted her perch in the Derangement Aviary to make sense for a rare day:

Hey, it would be on an even lower grade level if it weren’t for that colon. You see my point? The punctuation says nothing about the difficulty or ease of the material in a text written for oral delivery. It’s a signal to the speaker, indicating the length of pauses, the degree of flow. But I could just as well have written the previous 2 sentences as one sentence, with a colon in the middle, so quite aside from the oral/written distinction, the Flesch-Kincaid test is a pretty simplistic device to leverage an argument that a text is simplistic.

Or, blogging on papyrus several centuries ago, Aristotle commented:

To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.

At any event, the universal snark on the Left and the Right continues, reliably and comfortingly as inane, self-centered and predictable as might have been predicted on the day BEFORE the State of the Union Address, where we were treated to endless hours of cable news, pundits, blogs and radio commentators “reporting” on the future event.

(Like we’ve been good at soothsaying, as a Class of Seers, or, written to that 8.4 grade level: Being a know-it-all doesn’t mean you know anything.)

Then again, when Fidel Castro makes the best and clearest American political observation of the day, you realize how generally worthless most of these talking skin-bags are in the actual Great Scheme of Things:

Fidel Castro lambasted the Republican presidential race as the greatest competition of “idiocy and ignorance” the world has ever seen in a column published Wednesday …

Damned leftists.

Here’s what he actually said, if you, like me, are suspicious of paraphrasing foreign articles from hostile sources by lazy and sensationalistic American “journalists”:

Debo señalar según cuentan todos, que la selección de un candidato republicano para aspirar a la presidencia de ese globalizado y abarcador imperio, es a su vez, -lo digo en serio- la mayor competencia de idioteces e ignorancia que se ha escuchado nunca.Como tengo cosas que hacer, no puedo dedicarle tiempo al asunto. De sobra sabía que sería así.

Machine Translation #1:

I should note as have all the selection of a Republican candidate running for president of the global and comprehensive empire, is in turn,-I mean-the largest competition of crap and ignorance that has ever heard. Because I have things to do, I can not devote time to the issue. Knew full well it would be like.

Machine Translation #2:

I should note as have all the selection of a Republican candidate running for president of the global and comprehensive empire, is in turn,-I mean- the largest competition of crap and ignorance that has ever heard.

Courage.