Monday, December 12, 2005

Does anyone else think it's weird that the Bush speechwriting shop simply copied five paragraphs from last week's speech and plopped them into today's speech without really changing a word?

According to the White House transcript of today's speech, Bush said this, starting in the third sentence of paragraph 7:

The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists and Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein. They reject an Iraq in which they're no longer the dominant group. We believe that over time most of this group will be persuaded to support a democratic Iraq led by a federal government that is strong enough to protect minority rights, and we're encouraged that many Sunnis plan to actively participate in this week's election.

Last week he said this, starting in the second sentence of paragraph 12:

The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists and Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein -- they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group. We believe that, over time, most of this group will be persuaded to support a democratic Iraq led by a federal government that is strong enough to protect minority rights.

The two speeches are almost a verbatim match for four more paragraphs, and then the first sentence of a fifth.

The riffs were the same in the speech on November 30, but at least the wording was different.

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New York reporters couldn't figure out how [Huey Long] expected to get space [in the papers] with the same gag every time he came to town, but now I think I understand. He was from a country that had not yet entered the era of mass communications. In Louisiana, a stump speaker still tells the same joke at every stop on a five-speech afternoon. He has a different audience each time, like an old vaudeville comic, and Huey just hadn't realized that when a gag gets national circulation it's spoiled.

--A. J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana (1960)

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