Political Commentators Rapturous Over Obama’s Speech, Find “Profound Symbolism” in Portions Where He Exposed Self, Defecated

inauguralspeechWASHINGTON – The reviews are in, and political commentators around the world are unanimous in praising Barack Obama’s inaugural address. 

Experts on presidential rhetoric lauded the speech for not producing any memorable lines, as well as for the absence of eloquence, form, structure and cohesiveness. Karlyn Kohrs Lyght, a speech communications professor at Hoboken State University, noted that Mr. Obama “avoided an overprepared oration written as if each line were intended to be carved into marble.”  On that score, Professor Kohrs Lyght said, Obama’s speech “far surpasses both the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” since both are carved into marble in the Lincoln Memorial.

Another commentator, Professor Kathleen Hall Monitor of the University of Roddochain, explained that the speech was a landmark because it “found a deep frisson in its shreds and patches, all of them seemingly stitched together by a speechwriter who, reaching out to the average 27-year-old in all of us, endlessly web-searched and channel-surfed for stardust moments that placed archaic notions of a single, compelling narrative under erasure.”

“In its absence of meaning,” Professor Hall Monitor explained, “President Obama’s speech gave meaning to absence.”

Virtually all analyses of the oration extolled the moment that came halfway through the inaugural address, when Obama, for no discernible reason, exposed himself to the crowd and then urinated over the balcony to prolonged cheers from the crowd.

But it was the shocking incident that followed several minutes later, when Obama suddenly dropped his pants and defecated, that has drawn the most commendation. Claudia Hajduk, a management communication professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business Ethics, extolled the image of the new president discharging his feces as “a profoundly symbolic, and appropriately intrusive, gesture that will be forever etched into the collective memory of a dominant culture that has long had it coming.”

The New York Times, in a 7,000-word analysis of the speech, summarized the feelings of a grateful world: “The only legitimate criticism that can be leveled at Mr. Obama’s address for the ages is that it will not be humanly possible, even for him, to improve upon it when he stands on the same spot four years from now and delivers another one.”

Jan 22