[Newspoetry] Great speech does.not.equal. great speaker

[Donald L Emerick]

Safire says, NYT editorial opinion today, that Bush's speech yesterday was one of the five best, out of some 20 second term speeches.  My opinion is otherwise, originally elsewhere posted.  Feel free to (re)distribute (as if!) it.

don.emerick - 12:44 PM ET 1.21.2005 (#12727 of 12727)

Great speech does.not.equal. great speaker 
Safire is right, as far as naked rhetoric goes, that the text of the message that Bush read was exceptionally well written by whatever ghosts write for Bush. 

But, that limelit spectrality suggests the proper mode for deconstructing the utter poverty of thinking in that same message. With Kennedy, Jefferson, and Lincoln -- for instance -- one always had a sense that the words that they spoke were very much the product of their own abilities at thinking and speaking. Their own speech was the substance of their living self. 

With Bush's speeches, though, especially when we compare his recent verbal miscues in "press talks," we know that he does not write his own ideas down, that he has no clear grasp of the issues that he so glibly mentions, that he has no idea at all of the most elementary meanings of the very basic words that he utters. 

The man is somewhat gifted at acting, at speaking, at cheerleading. His delivery was good, his originality nonexistent. 

Ghosts spoke but their speaking told us of a different bygone era of monumental events, now conveniently forgotten even by old buckaroos and yet older buck-a-rubes. Ghosts spoke, but their words were shadows of other times -- on Bush's lips they told us that this rascal of a man has no appropriate sense of the history of the times and our place in its world. 

Among America's natives it was once a customary precaution to note that some spoke like a snake, with a forked tongue, hissing like a timber rattler, coiled up to strike, defensively guarding its own turf. And, one state emblazoned its flag accordingly with a saying: Don't tread on me. With all apologies to the people of that state and to native Americans, I must say that Bush's speech was like that of a timber rattlesnake, rattling its sword, threatening more years of war, death and destruction. 

His speech was malapropos -- far, far more died in the tsunami than on 9.11; far, far more died in the carnage of civil wars in Africa than died in the Middle East. He spoke of an ownership society, but he refuses to take any responsibility at all for a world that is worse after four years of his rule of the world. Indeed, his idea of ownership itself is defective and faulty, for he believes owners should never be liable for the consequences of their usages of their own property. He would immunize property, so that it, above all else, is free to injure less free people in its rampaging quest to earn ever greater profits for its private self. 

Oh, the music of this speech was grand, but if you listened to the words and thought about this world, enough to care about it, then you would find the rating game that Safire plays yet another deceptive lie, another fraud, another warping of standards to fit the head of a man who is least worthy to wear the crown of state.