NPR blinked on today with Carmen in the shower already, and per usual I rolled onto my good ear (the one that hears things, that is) and did my best to ignore it. But I couldn’t. I was captivated by what sounded like a standard listener call on a right-wing talk show. Lots of “uh, and, uh” sort of stuff and general rhetorical claptrap about the world opinion of the United States. One thing that got through whole was “You can do a lot of things to be popular,” followed by some talk about how international opinion is nothing more than middle school hijinks. Still I did not raise my head to figure out what was going on, because I assumed that whatever this was, it would be short, because the guy was off his nut.

But it didn’t stop. The person kept on talking. I’ll emphasize here that, with the pillow muffling sound, I could hear strings of speech, but I wasn’t getting the whole thing. And I really couldn’t identify the speaker, other than that it was a man. There was a pause, and then he started in on a new topic, with equally nonsensical results, and I wondered if Carmen had accidentally pressed the “BAND” button when she got up and we were, in fact, in AM radio land.

By now you’ve probably guessed the punchline. I lifted my head from the pillow and it was our Commander in Chief at a press conference or some damn thing.

I’m not political in the “rah rah Party X” sense. I am, however, fiercely committed to “fair dealing” when it comes to the use of language to influence opinion. I looked forward to the McCain/Obama debates on the assumption that both of them were, by and large, committed to the same. Turns out I was half right – the first time McCain returned to himself was during his concession speech. I have endeavored at every turn to avoid listening to George W. Bush, not because I disagree with his policies, but because I cannot stand to hear the man talk. He’s like the worst possible accumulation of soundbites and fuzzy logic, wrapped up in a general inability to express himself in complete sentences. It doesn’t matter what the rationale is for the latest decision, I will not learn it by listening to him. So, to the extent possible, I’ve relied on my own digging to figure out what his administration is thinking.

This means that I was totally shocked to realize that the President sounded like a mid-market radio hack. For the past eight years. Oy.