Not everyone needs one.
Say what you will about Britain’s financial health, the daily rough and tumble of their parliamentary system prepares a pol to think on his feet.
|
|||||
Hot Mic
SponsorsBloggers in Arms
BlogrollContinuous WavePaid to BlogReciprocating EnginesSmarter'n MeWingmen
|
« Um Qasr 31 comments to Teleprompters |
Targets of Opportunityblog advertising is good for you Credo"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra" "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche "A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke "Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas "Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex For the Effort!Subscribe Tagsafghanistan AGW army Blogging buffoonery china culture economy Flying Friday Musings geopol Gratuitous slap GWOT Headlines health care History iran iraq issues Media Memory Lane Military Navy norks Oz pakistan piracy politicians politics Politics and Culture pundits Russia science sea stories silliness Small Stuff SoCal sport Tech Lust technology UAVs UK usaf usmc weapons WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better. Categories |
|||
|
Copyright © 2010 Neptunus Lex - All Rights Reserved |
|||||
Bring him over and pay him VERY well. Have him give lessons to the Republicans and the press. The schooling should be carried out sort of like the ‘survival’ schools in our military. Just to be sure that there is adequate attention to lessons and more than lip service given to actual learning and retention. Maybe even impart a bit of that educated Brit accent so that it’s even more fun to listen to.
I am not sure he would do well in the USA.
He speaks in full sentences, uses correct grammar and uses words of more than two syllables. Combine that with the lack of Hollywood good looks and I just don’t think that he will connect.
I don’t think our president would be able to think quickly enough to handle something like this.
We’ll see further conservative gains in Europe, but I fear the momentum yet swinging left in the Americas. Would that we had a few more well spoken voices.
Point well-taken. I rarely miss “PM’s Question Time” on C-SPAN and dearly wish we had something similar in our system. The process of having to address pointed questions from the Loyal Opposition, in real time (and subsequently televised for public consumption), would help to weed out the posturing incompetents and charlatans in our gub’mint. Forgive my redundancy.
Wow… just wow.
Makes me wish we had someone with those size stones here in Congress to “speak truth to power.”
*sigh*
I gotta go with Stan/tx on this one. His presentation is ENTIRELY too logical and rational for the MTV/American Idol crowd. Not enough of the ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED modifiers such as “like,” “you know,” “umm” and, “and ah.” to be understandable. GOT to get rid of the guy–sounds, looks and dresses too much like an educated WASP. It’s ok to sound and dress like one–if you’re conservative and look like Bobby Jindal–but not as a white conservative. No way, no how, uh-uh.
Of course, if you’re a conservative female then you’d better be a Smith graduate, be articulate and somehow PC “cosmopolitan”without being “sophisticated;” dress in sensible just-two-steps-above-dowdy clothes (one step and you have no fashion sense–two steps and you are a “serious,” but not “flashy” person) and have a husband whose an academic (or better yet a low-level state government bureaucrat) as opposed to a “greedy” businessman, so that your combined salaries are strictly middle class. No multiple home, successful, articulate, intelligent, uber fanshionista, powerful and sophisticated rich Carly Fiorina’s need apply–unless you’re a Democrat–then it’s all good.
Even with all that, every Republican woman would be marginalized to sex.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
My Man Skippy-san! Underneath that thin veneer of PC civilization the true un-PC Cro-Magnon man peeks out!
PS, but if you’re female and black–then it’s ok to be a fashionista–be it Michelle baby on the left or Conde on the right.
PPS–almost forgot, And the guy commits the ABSOLUTELY UNFORGIVABLE SIN of correctly pronouncing the English language–let alone using correct grammar, as stan/tx has already observed.
I’d say that would be impressive even if it was aired to the sound bite crowd with short attention spans.
Has punch.
Reminds me in a small way of one of my favorite monologues from Jack Nicholson in a few good men.
Even if our congress can’t handle the truth.
One can imagine that at one time in our country, sharing so much of our political heritage with Great Britain, that our politicans articulated, dare I say debated, postitions with such clarity and conviction. I can imagine that the deeply held positions that were debated in the Constitutional Convention might have been delivered with equal passion. In the end great compromises were reached that have stood the test of time – at least until now.
Today our politicians savage each other through surrogates and do all within their power to avoid ever having to debate anything or to even to stoop to having to read the bills they pass obligating generations yet born to unthinkable debt and servitude.
I was listening to Rep. Maxine Waters questioning Secretary Geitner on TV just a few minutes ago and the exchange should be an embarrassment for all members of Congress for the stain it brings on the body. But Congress has lost all ability to hold themselves to any standard let alone suffer the pangs of embarrassment that provided structure and upheld codes of honor and sacrifice long lost to our Republic.
How very sad.
OldT6Flyer/
The 2nd largest Confederate museum in America is located downtown off St. Charles Ave. off of/on Lee Circle facing Camp St, in New Orleans–Just opposite the D-Day/WWII Museum. Take a stroll in there when in town and read some of the letters written by both sides–officers and enlisted–during the war. Note not only the penmanship, but the logical clarity, good grammar, use of historical and literary allusions and reference; the fluid ability to quote from the ancient Greek and Roman texts and speeches–even by enlisteds–as compared to what passes for intelligent discourse today. After viewing such displays of thought and erudation, one cannot but help but to come away feeling not only ashamed of one’s own sad expressive limitations, but convinced that Darwin was wrong, and that we are in full reverse.
I should hasten to add that ever since the election of the first black Mayor of New Orleans, the museum has been under constant attack by both the blacks and white, “enlightened” “progressives” who want to scatter it’s irreplaceable historical contents to the four winds in the basements of various universities as being an “affront” to the majority population of the city, and appropriate it’s valuable real-estate for “better” social purposes. It took the threats of the previous Republican Gov. Mike Foster, just prior to Katrina to use the State’s clout via it’s real estate holdings and funding for the various universities as well as the threat to move the entire thing to Baton Rouge to threaten the museum’s opponents and get them to back down.
Close your eyes, engage the Brit accent filter and his entire argument easily applies without modification to our own sorry predicament. If only our own pols could speak the language… and more importantly act upon it.
Virgil, I’ve read a number of Civil War-era letters (and quotes), and I find that a normal adult can communicate quite nicely in the modern world without all the classical allusions.
Not only that, but a respectable number of those letters are nothing but elegant filler, as it were; take away the “great prose” and classic references, and there’s not much left, semantically speaking.
Of course that’s not true for all writing of that era, but let us recall that having something concrete to say sometimes trumps elegant generalities.
In fact, the historian H. Stuart Hughes argued in his Contemporary Europe: A History that such an education counted more in European parliaments than the actual ability to run a government, which might explain the troubles many European countries had before WW2…
On the other hand, the honorable Daniel Hannan does not waste time with such frippery, but still manages to communicate his point quite nicely.
Oh, well; not everyone can be a Churchill…
Casey/
“Frippery,” “elegant filler” or not, at least the ability to make such “classical references” acknowledges, at a minimum, that other centuries existed prior to ours, and of a mind at least aware of other alternatives to the present condition. One doesn’t have to wax Churchillian, as Hannan ably demonstrates in his own inimitable, sarcastic style, but at least it would be nice if today’s generation at least knew who he was–let alone what he said or represents. So I’ll let you bank on Jay Lenno’s Jay-Walking All-Stars (college graduates all and imbibers of the best this epoch has to offer in the way of knowledge) to insure modern erudition and logical thought’s contribution to the future of the Republic while I’m pouring the foundations for the safe house/bunker well out of the public eye, in a temperate zone in a place near a stream with running water and out of the prevailing radioactive wind-drift projections.
But in the meantime, I’m glad to be reassured by you that today’s politician’s and their youthful future replacements have so much that is concrete to talk about.
And you needn’t worry about Churchill anyway, as Obama’s already banished him from the White-House…Cheers
Casey/
“…a normal adult can communicate quite nicely…”
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not a “normal” adult–clinical references provided upon request. (My wife would also provide them, but she’s too disgusted to bother)
Now, I know who Winnie the Two was, but I have no idea who this Hannan chap might be. I guess I shall have to go out into the darkness, where there is wailing, and gnashing of teeth….and turn on my new STANLEY HID searchight!
4 score and 7 years ago our forefathers set forth…
simple, elegant, no fripperies.
That was communicating at a level not seen in America since the Bull Moose.
I have several hundred letters from an ancestor who joined the Union Army. He was a surgeon. His letters to his father and sister don’t seem to have any of this padding you refer to.
The guy is an Obama supporter by the way-according to his blog.
Hey, Skippy… that just proves nobody bats 1.000.
If you only listen to Obama’s words you can find much to agree with – its his actions that create the disconnect for me.
All changed, changed utterly: A terrible uncertainty was born.
Years ago I had several Brits working for me come over to do some “customer visits”. One night in a hotel they found our CSPAN channel with some congressman just giving the opposition the what fors. Then the camera pulls back and one sees that except for a sleeping page or two, the chamber is empty!! They never let me forget that one. Their government does have its foibles, but spirited public debate – with manners- is something this country could use.
If he were an American Podesta and Company would be rooting through his trash can, sniffing in every corner of his life, and bringing frivolous law suits in their attempts to intimidate and discredit him like they are doing to Sarah Palin.
Newt Gingrich could match this Gentleman on an equal plain — or, plane, if you choose. Dick Armey would also be his equal. — On the other hand, mean Joe Biden could drown him in a whirlpool of scarcastic nonsense.
The problem is: The Gentleman is correct, neither his Emperor nor the USA one are wearing any clothes! [Does that mean they are not even using thread-bare arguments?]
Wow. Nice find, that was a royale a** chewing, but done so eloquently.
Listened to the head of the bank of England defending herself in the House of Commons on BBC radio yesterday. Very rough and tumble indeed!
Too bad there were no Republicans who had the courage to say this to Bush when he was running up the debt. Why wait until you’re no longer in power to get religion on deficit spending? (Dumb question, sorry.)
There is much here that badly needs to be said, but the messengers are compromised.