Posted 6:19 AM by Gene

WELL, I sacrificed some sleep to watch P&G -- the Democratic Party roll out the NEW! IMPROVED!! DIPPITY-DO!!! It was a launch of staggering ineptitude: early on the looney left crowd seemed as completely bored as their audience, except when GEN. McCLELLAN stomped his feet and said we should get out of the QUAGMIRE!!!!!, or whatever he said; Sen. Morals had them clapping like frozen pancakes. Not even THE CLEANING LADY, full of LEGACY, could shake the crowd from its torpor; perhaps she was in another negotiation. After Lucas Spielberg's breathtakingly banal intro (with its expensively staged 8mm war footage) and MAX' exquisitely self-pitying downer the candidate launched into his imitation of Mr. Viagra's "Who Am I?" speech of '96. That senators cannot orate -- that virtually no politician can these days -- goes without saying (except among NEWS HACKS); but surely DIP could have said it in far less than the 55 minutes truncated to 42 because he was worried the BIG THREE would cut him off. Generations of school children studied the Gettysburg Address for a reason; the real lesson of that day in 1863, a lesson lost amidst the gas of newshackery and the Web and our age's infinite self-regard, is that Lincoln followed a "revered" speaker, Edward Everett, who eulogized for TWO HOURS, and whom the assembled dignitaries and flacks called BRILLIANT. (They virtually ignored Lincoln.) DIP would have spoken for two hours because he didn't know better. What he said I don't know, and I doubt he does either. Indeed the speech already languishes inert in history's landfill, and in short order so will the excesses and irrelevancies that cluttered it; the CPR on a hamster, the rock band, the marching up and down over 'Nam, the catwalk strutting of DIP's Sex and the City daughters, Bruce, THE SALUTE, the commuter-express delivery, "hair pollution," the f'in' balloon drop, all the manners of stupidity that mark this godawful age. A dead giveaway of its quality: JEFF GREENFIELD didn't exuberantly praise it.

Other than that, of course, it was

A BRILLIANT SPEECH.