Barack Obama, Bullshit, and Poetry

Politico proudly proffers a bit of a young Barack Obama's musings on a piece of poetry - T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land - and declares him (Obama, not Elliot) to be a man of genius:

“Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance,” Obama wrote, musing on William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound as he went. “You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?


Gee, how many leftist-approved nonsense words can one actually fit onto the head of a pin? Politico pants:

One part Holden Caulfield, one part Immanuel Kant.


No, not really. It's verbal masturbation of the most immature sort, a university-approved sibling to its corporate cousin, some suit who steps into a meeting to proclaim he has an out of the box, barrier-breaking paradigm. A no-brainer right in the wheelhouse, that handles the client's needs soup-to-nuts, along with an action plan containing all the bells and whistles. Its' engaging, its empowering, and it pushes the envelope. It's a win-win, with the metrics to back it up...


 Ready to puke yet?

And yet, to some, Obama's immature buzzword-babble is a sign, in fact, that he's a real man of genius:

The amazing thing, Perelman and others point out, is how much of a window into Obama’s thinking and personality appears to shine through those few short lines. Obama’s critique reveals a sense of detachment, a focus on transcendence over religiosity, a grappling with tough ideas and both an eagerness to impress and an ability to do so.

“It kind of makes the case for him being not religious in any organized way, but in a spiritual, philosophical way,” Perelman said. He added later, “You could read this as pointing toward a strain in him that favors ambivalence. But basically it just makes him to me about four times smarter than most politicians.”


Or maybe it just makes him smart enough to bullshit his easily bamboozled professors...