Obama mixes metaphors in banal Kennedy eulogy

By Henry Percy

President Obama, he of the soaring rhetoric, needs to give his speech writers a day off now and then. He's obviously been working them to death.

Consider his eulogy for Senator Kennedy.

While he was seen by his fiercest critics as a partisan lightning rod, that is not the prism through which Ted Kennedy saw the world, nor was it the prism through which his colleagues saw him.

How do you like your metaphors? Mixed? Teddy did not see the world through the prism of a lightning rod? I should hope not -- unless he was exceptionally pixilated.

Setting aside the horribly mangled metaphors, the sentence translates into intelligible English thusly: "Ted and his friends did not see the world as his critics do." Talk about banal: Who sees the world as his critics do? Such embarrassing prose in an undergraduate's paper would be covered with red ink, yet our magniloquent Orator-in-Chief reads this stuff without blushing. Does Obama even know what he is reading from those ubiquitous teleprompters?