Obama, The Golden-Tongued Orator

19 October 2012

Obama’s use of the English language, his unerring ability to come up with just the wrong word, is something to behold. An American ambassador and three co-workers slain by terrorists on the anniversary of 9/11 are just “bumps in the road,” an occurrence that he perceptively agrees is “not optimal.” At least he refrained, on this occasion, from describing this act of premeditated violence against Americans as not terrorism but a “man-caused disaster.”

How nice to have a president so eloquent in expressing our deepest sadness and anger.

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Say What? (3)

  1. Alan October 20, 2012 at 6:21 am | | Reply

    I cannot stand Obama but it was Jon Stewart who fed him the word ‘optimal’. This particular slag, unlike many others, really is not fair.

  2. John October 20, 2012 at 7:04 am | | Reply

    Yes, but he didn’t have to eat it. He could have reacted the same way the rest of did when we heard it, which is the same way we reacted when we heard him refer to their bodies, and the attack that produced them, as “bumps in the road.”

  3. John October 20, 2012 at 9:26 pm | | Reply

    Regarding Alan’s comment, this just in from James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” at the Wall Street Journal:

    Obama’s defenders have argued it’s unfair to fault Obama for this maladroit choice of words because Stewart used the word “optimal” first. The Mail quotes the question to which the president was responding: “Is part of the investigation helping the communication between these divisions? Not just what happened in Benghazi, but what happened within. Because I would say, even you would admit, it was not the optimal response, at least to the American people, as far as all of us being on the same page.”

    It seems to us this only makes Obama’s answer worse. Stewart was asking Obama a puffball question–one that reduced the problem to a failure of communication (a familiar excuse for the World’s Greatest Orator) and that downplayed even that by using the weak phrase “not . . . optimal.”

    Obama could have hit this out of the park by amplifying Stewart’s sentiment: Not only was it not optimal, it was disgraceful, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to make sure nothing like this happens again. Instead he adopted Stewart’s phrase and used it to downplay not just the administration’s foul-ups but the deaths of four Americans. Sometimes this guy seems to be his own worst frenemy.

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