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A Stubbornly Passionless Speech
...Obama has a plan: “BP will pay.” Of course it will: It is legally obliged to. Did we need a president to tell us so, at prime time? But Obama has a civilizational point to make. In the opening of his address, right after al Qaeda, he spoke of the oil spill “assaulting” our shores. In language redolent of the neocon fighting words of yore, directed against Islamist terrorism, he intoned that “We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes,” to “make sure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.” On the edge of my seat, I was waiting for the punch line: You’re either against this oil spill, or with it. It never came.

Instead, we got the rinky-dink green tub-thump against “America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels”; and the rinky-dink chest-puff that asserted that “The time to enhance a clean-energy future is now.” And don’t forget those “energy-efficient windows” that Obama talked about in reverent tones, windows the president would like all of us to have...lest we defenestrate ourselves in a state of oil-crazed madness. That is, unless we “seize the moment” and “rally together and act as one nation.” Whee!...