Another brilliant insight by Mark Steyn about the meaning of the word "truck"

While Bill Clinton may be famous for saying "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is," Mark Steyn makes a brilliant observation about Barack Obama and, how his last speech really boils down to "it depends on what the word "truck" means.

It's all part of the same postmodern mindset that divorces reality and truth from words.

Here's an excerpt of Mark's column, which really must be read in its entirety.

The defining moment of his doomed attempt to prop up Martha Coakley was his peculiar obsession with Scott Brown's five-year-old pickup:

"Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads," the president told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. "Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck."

How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama's line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown's pickup was a prop – like the herd of cows Al Gore rented for a pastoral backdrop when he launched his first presidential campaign. Or the "Iron Chef" TV episode featuring delicious healthy recipes made with produce direct from Michelle Obama's "kitchen garden": The cameras filmed the various chefs meeting the first lady and then picking choice organic delicacies from the White House crop, and then, for the actual cooking, the show sent out for stunt-double vegetables from a grocery back in New York. Viewed from Obama's perspective, why wouldn't you assume the truck's just part of the set? "In his world," wrote The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, "everything is political, and everything is about appearances."

Howard Fineman, the increasingly loopy editor of the increasingly doomed Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn't just any old prop but a very particular kind: "In some places, there are codes, there are images," he told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. "You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another."

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer. Man, he's racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that's easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.

Whenever aspiring writers ask me for advice, I usually tell 'em this:

Don't just write there, do something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or tap-dance, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don't do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman – men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real.

America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B, and those who think a pickup is coded racism.

Kathy Shaidle comments on this column (and a hat tip as well):

Besides being one of his recent best, Mark Steyn's new column is a mini master class for writers.

First, because it's about words: their misuse, and their power -- or, in Obama's case, their lack of power, as his vaunted (and exaggerated) oratorical skills are already failing him.

Second, because if you look carefully, you'll see a great example of one of those hard-to-imitate Mark Steyn "moves". His use of cliches is a bit like Oscar Wilde's, if less aphoristic; watch and learn:

As he did with his Copenhagen pitch for the Olympics, he put his personal prestige on the line, raised the stakes, and then failed to deliver. All those cool kids on his speechwriting team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in.

Now, hundreds of columnists this week used the expressions "phone it in," and mentioned Obama "flying in," but nobody put them together.