Thursday, November 12, 2009

Barack Obama: The New Joe Biden

President Obama is apparently determined that he will not be upstaged by his Vice President.

Joe Biden, as most Americans of a certain age will know, has a rich history of… ahem… borrowing choice quotes from the speeches of other politicians. Deceased members of the Kennedy family have been particularly favored sources of oratorical inspiration for him.

Enter President Obama.

Vlad Tepes — the blogosphere’s premier subtitler and video gumshoe — has discovered a notable concordance of phrasing between Barack Hussein Obama and John Fitzgerald Kennedy:


During his long political career Joe Biden has been willing to pay any price and bear any burden to achieve rhetorical eloquence in public speaking. Below the jump are two video investigations of Mr. Biden’s speechmaking efforts from more than twenty years ago.
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The first video finds him channeling two dead Kennedy brothers:


The second reaches farther afield, to (former) British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock:


Well, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.*

Is Mr. Biden an original thinker?

Not by any means. More like a tasteful thief. The only art he’ll ever study is stuff that he can steal from.


* Attributed variously to Bob Hope, Miles Davis, Mark Twain, and George Friedrich Handel.

David Bowie.

2 comments:

Vladtepesblog.com said...

And as a certain mr. Millar noted, how does one 'persevere when it's easy'?

Godffrey said...

The nerve of that man! How could he not have realized that Barack Obama's (pbuh) unparalelled genius transcends even time itself! And what is so great about this Kennedy guy anyway? He had none of the qualifications necessary to be president: he wasn't black, he didn't have an inspirational story, he wasn't revered as a national saint while he was alive, and he wasn't even black!