If Shakespeare Were Still Around

In honor of Shakespeare's birthday, here is what the Bard might have written if he were around today:

On Barack Obama:

"Give my my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me."
-Antony and Cleopatra

On Obama's plan for withdrawing from Iraq:

"Let us make an honourable retreat; though not with bag and baggage, yet with scrip and scrippage."
-As You Like It

On Obama's plan for healthcare reform:

"Great griefs I see, medicine the less."
-Cymbeline

On Obama's public oratory:

"I would be loath to cast away my speech, for besides
It is excellently well penned. I have take great
pains to con it."
-Twelfth Night

On Vice President Joe Biden:

"Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire."
-Love's Labour Lost

On former President Bush:

"Like a dull actor now,
I have forgot my part, and I am out,
Even to a full disgrace."
-Coriolanus

On the Bush-Cheney approach to the war on terror:

"Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of fent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleep, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men."
-Ibid

On Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner:

"Has this fellow no feeling of his business,
that he sings at grave-making?"
-Hamlet

On Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke:

"I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing only lingers it out, but the disease is incurable."
-Henry IV, Part 2

On Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

"O tiger's heart wrapp'd in a woman's hide!"
-Henry VI, Part 3

On Sen. John McCain:
"Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek,
a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is
not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin
double, your wit single, and every part about you
blasted with antiquity, and will you yet call yourself
young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John!"
-Henry IV, Part 2

On former Sen. Tom Daschle's tax problems that kept him from accepting a Cabinet position:

"Poor Tom's a-cold."
-King Lear

On former President Bill Clinton:
"Alas! Why gnaw you so your nether lip?"
-Othello

On Rush Limbaugh:

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the
cocks!"
-King Lear

On Obama's White House news conferences:

"I am not bound to please thee with my answer."
-Merchant of Venice

On White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel:

"You swear like a comfit-maker's wife:"
-Henry IV, Part 1

On Obama's view of congressional Democrats:

"I do perceive here a divided duty."
-Othello

On Minnesota's outspoken GOP Rep. Michelle Bachmann:

"You speak like a green girl,
Unsifted in such perilous circumstance."
-Hamlet

On the Washington bureaucracy's real attitude toward Americans:

"Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens!"
-As You Like It

On Obama's speechwriters' advice to him:

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as life the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and - as I may say - whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness."
-Hamlet

On the news media:

"The nature of bad news infects the teller."
-Antony and Cleopatra

Comments

[jeanrenoir]

These are indeed the Lear days for America, but without Lear's saving discovery of the wages of narcissism which finally humbles him and saves his soul. The reckless narcissism first diagnosed as the Boomers fatal flaw when Tom Wolfe called them "the ME Generation" has now literally bankrupted the entire country. First Clinton, having oral sex while this henchmen turned the country over to his cronies in the Wall St. investment banks. Then Bush, who turned the country over to the insane Boomer neocons, who wrecked our ship of state in the sands of Iraq, while he got to play Tom Cruise on TV with his jet landing. And then there are the greedy Wall St. shyster Boomers who collaborated with their equally narcissistic and greedy, something-­for-nothin­g, subprime mortgage Boomer customers to put the finishing touches on America's financial ruin, and grease the skids of our journey to the ash heap of history, with China holding all our debts. The whole Boomer generation was a collective narcissistic Lear. Starting in the Sixties, they incessantly brayed about how they were God's gift--to "morality" of course (the only issues that shall count from now on are "civil rights" and "peace"; there ARE no private issues of morality anymore--it's all just go with the flow of your narcissistic desires now) and, needless to say, to hipness. Too bad the boomers' selfish follies have bankrupted them and left them naked, like Lear, on the heath of old age.

[FearlessFreep]

"The weight of these sad times we must obey:

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say"--KING LEAR