Slate.com this morning reports on the news being reported around the country.Among its offerings is Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times today, which compares the incoming president with the outgoing one.
"...One seems small and inconsequential, even though he keeps insisting he’s not; the other grows large and impressive, filling Americans with cockeyed hope even as he warns them not to expect too much too soon...."
Dowd also argues that Bush has given "the good-and-evil view of things a bad name. Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys. Good and evil intermingle in the same breath, let alone the same society. A moral analysis cannot be a simplistic analysis."
Elsewhere, the apparently soaring Huffington Post headlines: "OPTIMISM SWEEPS NATION." The Chicago Sun-Times leads with a discussion of Obama’s speech on Tuesday, giving considerable attention to whether Obama will break down and cry -- really -- and also to Malia Obama’s comment to her father, "First African American president: better be good." And at the New Yorker’s website, Hendrik Hertzberg muses over Obama’s performance since the election, the public’s overwhelming approval and post-election merchandising.
Hertzberg also mentions this clip from 2001 in which state senator Barack Obama reviews a Chicago restaurant.
There’s something very funny about hearing Obama speak so thoughtfully about johnny cakes and peach cobbler.
From overseas, the Melbourne Age imagines Bush showing Obama around the White House. Of the Oval Office: "... This is the heart of democracy, the very epileptic of freedom. You will like the carpet in here. Laura had it put in. It replaced the awful thing that those Clinton folks brought back from Englandistan."
And the London Times has a long but interesting take on Obama’s moves since the election: "He realised that Rick Warren was an egomaniac and wanted some kind of platform, so he gave him a largely symbolic role at the inauguration and allowed Warren to preen. He knew that what Washington pundits really craved was not the truth, but a sense of their own importance. So he let them throw him a dinner party."
Saturday Night Live opened last night with "Dick Cheney: The Final Interview", in which Diane Sawyer asks an ever more zany series of questions about things Cheney might have regretted, from the invasion of Iraq to the death of Old Yeller, to the fact that our kids grow up too soon, to the fact that he shot his friend in the face. In each case Cheney replies, "I do not." It’s less funny than disturbing.
Saturday Night Live also offered the "Gitmo Closing Ad":
Lastly, the Onion has this very funny video about a proposed Inaugural Dance ceremony being presented in Congress.
Congress Debates Adding Elaborate Dance To Obama’s Inauguration Ceremony
