Someone needs to tell Barack Obama -- it must get particularly confusing
this time of year -- that his own birth is not Year One, the date around
which all other events are understood. His much-noted, self-referential
tic was on cringe-worthy display Friday when the president gave his
eulogy for the late Sen. Daniel Inouye, who served in Congress for half a
century representing Obama’s birth state of Hawaii.
Inouye was a Japanese-American war hero (he lost an arm in World War II, destroying his dream of becoming a surgeon), and as a senator he served on the Watergate committee, helped rewrite our intelligence charter
after scandals, and was chairman of the Senate committee that
investigated the Iran-Contra affair. It’s the kind of material any
eulogist could use to give a moving sense of the man and his
accomplishment. But President Barack Obama’s remarks at Inouye’s funeral service were a bizarre twirl around his own personal Kodak carousel.
-- Emily Yoffe, "Today We Are Gathered … To Hear More About Me" (Slate).