Super-Genius President and "Ultimate Man" Still Reading the Same Book He Supposedly Read Last Year

Is this a nitpick? I don't think so. Obama is supposedly an intellect on par with DaVinci. He doesn't really do anything, but, unlike that troglodyte Sarah Palin, he actually reads. Like, whole books 'n stuff. Real books without pictures.

Or, at least, he's photographed holding them.

Looks like President Obama is one slow reader.

The commander in chief's list of beach books for his Martha's Vineyard vacation includes an environmental best seller that he bragged about reading almost a year ago on the campaign trail.

Obama was so taken with Thomas Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded" that he quoted it at a rally last September in Flint, Mich., and one media outlet described it as the book that was currently on the then-candidate's nightstand.

The 448-page book appeared again on Monday on the list of five books that Obama planned to read on his vacation in Martha's Vineyard.

So apparently President Einstein is a lip-reader.

Or I guess maybe he just wants to re-read it, since it was a such a page-turning potboiler the first time around he skimmed huge sections of it just to get to the surprise ending.

About 20 years ago I remember the media snarking on a spate of intellectual-posturing celebrities all being photographed on planes with Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Unlikely they were actually reading it, because the book was wordy, weighty, and slow, and it took me a month of forcing myself to read it to finish it, and I was in school and had a lot of free time.

There is a whole category of books that sell well primarily because people want to be perceived as the sort of person who reads that book. Despite the fact they're not.

And there is an old observation in the media world that The Economist persists as a viable magazine precisely due to that vanity.

Bonus: "I Just Wanted to Come and Breathe the Same Air as [the Obamas]: Remember when the MSM used to poke fun at conservative Republicans for what they perceived as an over-fondness, verging on hero-worship, of George W. Bush?

I do.

The difference in the positive play for outright Obama worship? (And yes, I do mean literal worship, as if venerating a deity.)

The media gets this one. They can see it. It's not something to goof on; it's something instead to proudly report so as to demonstrate how wildly popular President Forty-Eight Percent is.

posted by Ace at 02:03 PM

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