Posted 4:43 PM by Gene

During the last INFOMERCIAL everyone made a BRILLIANT speech. This time around the speeches aren't getting quite the accolades -- REPUBLICANS are EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL -- but the conservatives are proving as adept at inane partisanship as any six- and seven-digit news hack; if Barack made a BRILLIANT SPEECH why, so did AH-nult -- because he's a REPUBLICAN. The cheerleaders further confuse sentiment for BRILLIANCE, as with Rudy, who definitely must seek higher office again, but who'd be no Lincoln minus ghostwriters. And count on VIR-GIN-IA to create an instant cliche (who says bloggers aren't good at cliches?), picked up by STERNO the way a dog fetches its master's slippers, that Rudy was BRILLIANT because he was "CONVERSATIONAL." That reminds me all too painfully of the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint. A speech can have zero eloquence, indeed it can display total flatfooted incompetence, and the hacks will call it BRILLIANT if it does the barest minimum of what a good speech does; but once good speechmaking enriched and enlivened our public discourse. Now it's CONVERSATIONS, from people who aren't very good CONVERSATIONALISTS, let alone SPEECHMAKERS.

Speechmaking's gotten so bad we've forgotten what the word STEMWINDER means.