Obama to Grads: A Little iPod Is a Dangerous Thing

by Gregg Opelka

President Obama delivered the commencement address at Hampton University in Virginia on Sunday and, for those accustomed to his usual dose of narcissism, hypersensitivity, and self-serving historical revisionism, the Kvetcher-in-Chief didn’t disappoint. Here’s the text of the speech, courtesy of WaPo.

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You have to give the President credit. Even when delivering a speech designed to inspire the leaders of tomorrow, Obama can still sniff out a way to complain about his perceived ill treatment at the hands of the media. Whether it’s Onstar or Garmin, this man’s persecution GPS has pinpoint accuracy. Judge for yourself:

With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all…to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. ..Even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I’ve had some experience with that myself.

Notice the provenance of those “clamoring voices” which Obama insidiously cites: blogs (read new media journalists), talk radio (read Limbaugh, Levin, Medved, et al.), cable (read Fox News). Not the network MSM which coddles Obama, not hoop-shooting Harry Smith or soft-balling Brian Williams, whom Obama himself— at last year’s White House Correspondents dinner –joked about being in bed with.

It’s difficult to remember a whinier American president. If this man’s skin were any thinner, it would be diaphanous. You’d think one of his handlers would have told him: in the eyes of followers, victimhood lessens a leader. Did Patton complain of the desert heat? You bet. To the troops? Never.

The irony, of course, is that the least-challenged president in modern memory spends more time than any other telling us how nobody knows the troubles he’s seen. Reagan welcomed criticism. He’d never pass up a chance to make his critics laugh with a witty riposte. Obama can’t resist letting them know they nearly made him cry.

To be fair, Obama’s speech did include the obligatory “Climb Every Mountain” platitudes extolling the virtues of higher education. But it also featured curious windows into the Obama psyche, such as this gem:

You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this…is putting new pressures on our democracy.

To riff on Pope, “A little iPod is a dangerous thing.” Obama’s Queeg-like obsession with media scrutiny borders on the pathological. “Beware the hazardous iPod, the scurvy iPad!” he seems to warn, spreaders of “arguments which don’t rank high on the truth meter.”

It’s hard to imagine what Steve Jobs’ reaction to Obama’s techno-alarmism would be. But it’s even harder to imagine what the poor Hampton U grad of 2010 must have thought hearing it live: So on the one hand, Mr. President, you’re saying it’s good we got a great education (“All those checks you wrote to Hampton will pay off”), but on the other hand, we should be afraid of all these new-fangled gadgets that distract us with—OMG—information?

Anyone else finding it hard to wrap his iMind around that one?

Like Haley Osment’s “dead people” in The Sixth Sense, Obama sees media tormentors everywhere. Now it’s all those new gizmos—with their low ranking on the “truth meter.” So which is it? Is knowledge a “tool of empowerment?” Or is it dangerous? College is so confusing these days.

Two more of Obama’s valedictory remarks scored miserably on the “truth meter” but were off-the-charts on the “irony meter.” Here’s a beaut:

And it will be up to you to open minds that remain closed. That, after all, is the elemental test of any democracy: whether people with differing points of view can learn from each other, work with each other, and find a way forward together.

Yeah. Like the way Obama “learned from” Paul Ryan, “worked with” Marsha Blackburn, and “found a way forward” with Mitch McConnell and the other Republicans at that phony-baloney Health Summit. How open-minded of him.

Finally, in this astonishing—astonishing—sentence about an accomplished black woman named Dorothy Height who recently died at age 98, Obama, unjustifiably and guilefully, attempts to equate the passage of Obamacare with the struggle to end previous terrible civil rights injustices:

“Having been on the firing line for every fight from lynching to desegregation to the battle for health care reform, she lived a singular life.”

Considering that the majority of the country still opposes Obamacare and thoroughly repudiated the arrogant, unilateral manner in which it was forced upon it, this attempt by Obama to pretty up his image by garbing the health care debate in the clothing of a racial issue is particularly reprehensible. To liken health care reform to ending segregation and lynchings is an ignoble attempt to rewrite history and elevate his unpopular bill to a status it hasn’t, and likely never will, come close to earning.

But then what else would you expect from a man with a Sixth Sense about being persecuted?


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Posted May 10th 2010 at 3:23 pm in Culture, Education, News, Obama, Politics | 223 Comments