If the New Republic is required reading in the new White House

Then Obama’s first administration is unlikely to accomplish much, since it would take about four years just to get through this post. The first paragraph alone made me feel like Seagal when he wakes up from his coma in Hard to Kill:

The concert began with the Star Spangled Banner, not sung by the audience but played by Yo-Yo Ma and ten musicians of his Silk Road Ensemble. It is a more stirring piece and at the same time also more restrained when rendered by instruments that include the beguiling shakuhatchi, pi pa and bag-pipes than when we most often hear it with some tenor fulfilling his duty just before the first pitch at a baseball game.

In all honesty, if I edited a magazine and Marty Peretz didn’t have a penny, I’d still keep him on the masthead just to see what he’d do. I almost keep expecting him to throw off his mask and say the last 30 years have been a hoax. Perhaps because his writing reminds me of Steve Martin pretending to be an upper-class twit in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Seriously, given the collective prose stylings of Mr. Peretz and Mr. Wieseltier, I’m amazed that regular New Republic readers haven’t reverted to some sort of pre-syntactic language like that Amazon tribe.

While I’m at it I may as well link to this old standby on the Peretz-era New Republic.