And furthermore and so on - let me just say this last thing about that speech - even if one allows that it was 'great' - and I don't allow that but am willing to stomach the thought of allowing it for argument sake - even allowing for its putative [just can't help yourself, can you] greatness lets remember that the perceived need that occasioned it, the issue that caused it, that it was summoned forth to address, was a falsehood, a lie, a phony, self serving narrative manufactured by an hysterical liberal elite and enabled by their willing co-conspirators in the press - built to address an illusion, a manufactured reality, like a house built on sand, the speech, no matter how pretty, can have no lasting value since it is doomed to sink into the mud.
One enfeebled liberal actually compared it to the Gettysburg address - which is absurd but actually serves my purposes quite well - Lincoln's solemn address in that graveyard was great because the event and cause that occasioned and gave it true meaning were great - likewise Churchill's speeches were great because the events that defined them were monumental - Pericles' funeral oration was magnificent because the heroic deaths he honoured evoked the very ideal that was Athens - all these words were wonderful in their own right but were made great by the events and circumstances that occasioned them - Obama's speech was about a false narrative constructed on top of the corpses of some unfortunate innocents murdered by a psychopath - in other words, Obama's speech was occasioned by an event with, at best, a very limited scope that had little to say about the nation as a whole, or at worst, was the ignition point of a scandalous, partisan lie.
In fact, oddly enough, Palin's speech had more to say about what the tragedy actually had to do with the idea of America than Obama's speech did - she ruined it all of course with the 'blood libel' misstep, but her message of American exceptionalism being about open debate between free individuals unencumbered by an overbearing government had much more meaning relative to the events, at least as far as the idea of America goes, than Obama's words which merely said, when you boil them right down - can't we all just be nicer to each other - which may have sounded comforting and even noble under the circumstances, and indeed may be what people wanted to hear, I don't know - but ultimately is a message that falls far from any notion of greatness.
But regardless, expect more comparisons to Lincoln, as if the country has just gone through a similarily divisive and extremely trying ordeal by fire and Obama is now here to heal us as a nation - an association that is patently absurd, ridiculous, insulting, vile even - but that won't stop liberals from crawling all over each other to proclaim it.
