Oprah's Always Had A Big Thing For Quacks

Ladies and Gentlemen, if it walks like a duck, and squaks like a duck, then god damn it, it's a a motherfucking duck:

"President Obama could hardly have struck more wrong notes in his immigration speech yesterday if he had attacked a piano with a buzzsaw.  For me, the most egregious dissonance emerged with the sentence: 'Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith.'

Obama has real trouble expressing American ideas in the terms the average American would actually use.  Most Americans are, I think, comfortable with both the concept of Americanness and the significance of faith.  What Obama did in his speech was blend the two in a hortatory speech – not, in other words, an academic seminar-type venue – in a way no American I’ve ever known or seen would have.

There is still, for one thing, a very strong sense among Americans that, when discussing the big issues of human life, 'faith' is something you have in God, or at least in a higher power or some immanent reservoir of goodness.  Even those who don’t have such faith nevertheless use the word 'faith' to signify it.

Of course we also use 'faith' to talk about ordinary, non-transcendent reliance, on things like gravity, or the banks we keep our money in, or the capacities of the people we love to overcome their problems.  But clearly, in the context of his immigration speech, Obama was referring to an ideal; a large abstraction.  In that context, when Americans speak of faith, we are speaking of the religious, transcendent, or metaphysical.

In pairing 'faith' and Americanness, Obama made a vague, impressionistic association that tells us much about him; and one of the chief things is that he simply doesn’t think like an American."

Let me know when you see one of these around,...