Who Needs Speechwriters When You Have Control-C?

My favorite non-Reason advance piss-take on tonight's State of the Union address is this acid-bath from Gawker's Alex Pareene, sensibly headlined "The State of the Union Is Dumb Hacks Writing Garbage Speeches." As if to demonstrate Pareene's thesis, one pre-excerpt from the speech reads like this:

That's what middle-class economics is—the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

Bolding mine. Not only is this an example of what Pareene calls "an exercise in the proper arrangement of cliches and platitudes," it's also lifted wholesale from Obama's State of the Union address in 2012:

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

Obama owes himself a coke. And according to the sacred rules of Reason's Drinking Game, the rest of us owe ourselves a double shot.

#StateoftheUnion #BarackObama