I like Mike much less after these comments on a Feb. 28th radio show:
“I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits – The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”
Wow.
This is not credible. All of his references are to Kenya, not Indonesia. The Mau Mau revolution did not occur in Indonesia (The comment also suggests he has spent some time studying Kenyan history.) Going further, he reiterates the Rush Limbaughism about Obama’s “anti-British” and “colonialist” attitudes. The British did not rule Indonesia. It was colonized by the Dutch.
You’re busted, Mike.
Update: Great minds think alike, or someone at MSNBC is reading my blog….
Mr. Riehl,
While reading your contribution to the Arena section of Politico.com this morning I was struck by the second sentence, which read. “Frank highlights words (actually phrases) included such content-free formulations as…….” I am certainly not a communications expert, but shouldn’t this read something like this. “Frank’s highlighted words (actually phrases) included……” Or “Frank highlighted words (actually phrases) that included……” Maybe you just “misspoke”. Maybe we (the readers) should assume then, that you have a secret dark purpose. …And how many times did we hear the phrase “yes we can” during the campaign. Talk about empty. Yes we can….. what? There’s too much of this garbage that goes on no matter what side your on. I’m sorry. I guess I expect more.
Thanks for your interest, and your correction. Indeed there is a grammatical error there, and yes, as a wordsmith myself it is indeed irksome. The high-speed format on POLITICO does not, unfortunately, allow for the correction of such snafus; in the interest of keeping the conversation moving, we do not get to proofread our posts; I appreciate my editors greatly, but they too are not immune from the errant keystroke. Indeed, if this error was to show up on one of my students’ papers I would have reacted just as you did!
Second, I would probably meet you half-way on your more substantive comment about empty rhetoric on the left. By no means is this a GOP-only problem. One might even say there is a race-to-the-bottom problem in our political discourse. You might review my highly critical blog on Obama’s own empty rhetoric in the State of the Union Address, which rolled out the completely vapid (and strange) phrase “Win the Future.” I did not know we were losing the future, and I also do not know what winning it *means.* I would rise a bit more in defense of “Yes we can,” not only because Obama in his speeches used this formulation as the first half of a complete sentence, but also because it functioned rhetorically to respond to a malaise among many in this country that was itself an issue in the campaign. The parallel here is to Ronald Reagan (among my my favorite modern presidents) whose “Morning in America” was more than empty, as some liberal critics still charge. It spoke to the sense that the nation was emerging from darkness, and a similar malaise that many felt was the result of feckless leadership under Carter.