SYNECDOCHE: BARRY OBAMA SOTERA SOTERO BARACK AND SPEECH WEIRD AS ALWAYS

MOFOS TURD-BLOSSOM & BARRY FAIRIE NO MO WAR SPEECH

 Friday, September 13, 2013 Obama’s Exceptionally Weird Speech on Syria By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

 
“Oh, this will be easy,” I said to myself. “This speech is short!” Boy, was I wrong. I’ve always felt that exegesis saves, but now I’m experiencing a crisis of faith. Can there be bullshit so deeply impacted that it’s proof against color coding? We’ll see. But first, here’s why I thought the speech was weird:

1. The intricate verbal patterning that we’ve come to expect from Obama (Hamilton Project; inaugural; presser) isn’t present. Even at the presser, speaking extemporaneosly, Obama at least nailed his talking points. 

2. The text contains several simple and obvious grammatical errors (which must have been in the text. The errors cannot be caused by improvisation, since Obama uses a Teleprompter).

3. The speech is not well-structured. Although I divided the speech into parts retroactively, transitions between parts were not signalled for listeners in any way. Some listeners were confused, and no wonder.

4. The language is slack, flaccid, filled with dead metaphors, unclear referents, and national security jargon.

From the outside, it’s impossible to know whether all these quality defects were caused by time pressure, the larger exhaustion of the American imperial project, or even Obama, Nuke LaLoosh-like, shaking off the signs and writing his own pitch. Unlikely though that may seem.

As a result, there’s far less color-coding than usual — although I could have coded the entire speech in bullshit brown and liar’s red, that would have been just a stunt. Instead, I went through the speech in detail and peppered it with note after note, as if I were a policy debater again looking for points of weakness; and there are a rather lot of notes.

However, there is one particular rhetorical trick that Obama uses several times: Synecdoche (part for whole), and the way Obama uses it is extremely deceptive, almost like sleight of hand. He’ll focus your attention on a part that represents a whole; but by focusing on the part, you can’t focus on the whole. For example (see note 3), Obama says he wants to talk about “Syria.” But Syria is but one part of a whole Syrian crisis, which includes many other players like Russia, Iran, Turkey, and so on. But Obama doesn’t want to talk about all those players, since that would entail talking about the risk of a wider war, and so he says “Syria” in place of “Syrian Crisis.” He uses this device a number of times in the speech.

So, readers, despite the fact that this post is more than a little down in the weeds, I hope you find if fun and useful. I’m not a foreign policy wonk, so your corrections and additions will be very welcome.

Oh, and the contrasts between Obama’s speech, and speeches that Maggie Thatcher, Sir Edward Grey, and FDR gave in similar circumstances are interesting, and not in Obama’s favor.
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Category	Note
Secular religion	A mish-mash of phrases from the Framers, Lincoln and MLK echoes, and so forth
Bathos	Bathos is an abrupt transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace
Neo-liberal catchphrase	“Free market,” “innovation,” “hard choices” etc.
Populism	“Our most vulnerable citizens”
Bipartisan shibboleth	“The troops,” for example
Dead metaphors/cliche	“Ring the changes on,” “take up the cudgel for,” “toe the line,” “ride roughshod over,” etc. (Orwell)
Sheer nonsense	Word salad
Falsehood or truthiness	A terminological inexactitude
Equivocation	Lawyerly parsing and weasel wording
Boilerplate	“Ladies and gentleman,” and so forth.

I’ve divided the speech into parts for convenience, but the parts are not there in the original. To the transcript!
* * *
Part I: The case for war. >>  OBAMA: My fellow Americans,¹tonight I want to talk to you²about Syria³ – why it matters, and where we go from here.⁴

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/09/notes-on-obamas-exceptionally-weird-speech-on-syria.html

[SIDEBAR:  MY FELLOW AMERICANS I AM A FRAUD AND I WAS PAID SO MUCH SO CALLED MONEY TO DO THIS CHICAGO PIMP SHOW AND OF COURSE I'VE ABSOLUTELY LOVED THE EGO TRIP BEING A COMPLETE NARCISSISTIC SELF ENTITLED POLY ADDICTED DRUGGIE.  I'VE GOTTEN TO BE IN THE GROVE OF THE GROOVE IN THE CROWD OF IN AND TURD-BLOSSOM TO SMELL WHENEVER I FEEL FAINT, TOO!]