OBAMA STRIKES A CHORD WITH MIDDLE CLASS SPEECH. What cynical populist fable-telling. President Obama delivered a speech in Kansas yesterday appearing to speak up for America’s middle class, as if he wasn’t the reddest-handed fox in the hen house. Once again President Hope spews Orwellian double-speak as he eviscerates the world’s social fabric. Yet the media trumpets that Obama’s speech “struck a chord” in a most pernicious stretch of dissembling. If Obama struck a chord, it was like a guitarist strikes a chord, on a wrong note, or ringing true, but to say Obama’s words resonated is to pretend that wasn’t entirely the product of media amplification. In Obama’s case, lined-in through spin effects – in guitar terms it’s called Reverb. To strike a chord used to mean saying something that hit your listeners just right. Is that what happened? Does our Nero have anyone convinced –beside our media– that he’s Spartacus?
 
I’m disturbed because President Obama chose Osawatomie, Kansas to grace with his forked tongue. Osawatomie was the nickname given Abolitionist John Brown, for holding his ground in an early anti-slavery battle at the Osawatomie slave sanctuary. Obama might have chosen the locale for its historic Free State significance, but instead of mentioning the radical Brown, he praised Teddy Roosevelt, the father of American imperialism. BTW, the Weather Underground published its anti-imperial, anti-racism missives in an underground press magazine called Osawatomie.