Obama's West Point Speech on SP-117

 What if Barack Obama had given his West Point commencement address after taking Truth Serum? You don't have to wonder; Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club has posted that speech in his blog post Brother Rat.   It begins:

Thank me. Thank me so very much. Even though this is ostensibly a graduation speech it is really about me. My ratings have been slipping of late and my media advisors said a photo-op in Bagram and a speech at West Point will boost the polls by about 3 points. Among you is the first all-female command team, which I mention as an accomplishment, since there’s nothing else I can boast of. You are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan though you will probably see action elsewhere, as everything is going to hell in a handbasket. But I mention it as another kind of fake accomplishment, the only other thing I can think of other than the all-female command team.

And he goes on, including:

The world seems to be going down the tubes with accelerating speed. The Chinese are expanding in the South China Sea, the Japanese are rearming, North Korea is preparing another nuclear missile test and Iran’s supreme leaders has just said America must be destroyed. But under these appearances everything is going to plan. Power is being redistributed at rate never before known in history. And that’s how you make things better. It will be your generation’s task to accept temporary sacrifices, in which for the first time you will seem poorer than your parents; be the first generation of West Pointers to be everywhere on the defensive, be the first Americans whose fundamental duty is groveling in public.

It goes on in damning fashion, concluding:

We have been through a long season of war. And I managed to lose them all. I just want you to remember, in case you feel like blaming me, that it’s Bush’s fault.
The long gray line has never failed us though the long line of gray politicians always has.  The twilight is here. The country you once fought for has vanished – tone and tint. It has gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. And we stand upon a the threshold of a new era. A fundamentally transformed America. But in the evening of my administration I come back to West Point to borrow from you some vestige of the luster and honor which I have never had myself.
Always there echoes and re-echoes in my ear: “three polling points, three polling points”. Believe me when I say I need you more than you need me. But I want you to know that when I board the plane to attend the next fundraiser, my last conscious thoughts will be those another West Point Graduate said here 52 years ago. ”These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a tenfold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.” Yours not to reason why, yours but to do or die.

Fernandez does to Obama what Satan did to Mohamet in Dante's Inferno. Read the whole thing.