[James]

I have been reading through various posts and I was wondering if everyone realized some things:

Bush doesn't write his own speeches for the most part, they have very good political speech writers that handle that type of stuff and usually coordinate as part of an politcal strategy. So often times the same speech would sound better from a veteran of "Toastmasters".

Things like introducing widows etc. are staged to create a dramatic effect. At that level of politics the people have excellent media consultants working for them. Those of you in advertising and marketing can definitely relate, as well as students of human nature in general. The situation is to big for the PResident to just happen to stumble across a widow.

As a digression: Media consultants and proffesional political consultants said that PResident Ronald Reagan was a dream to work with because his acting experience made it very easy for him to work through the choreographed roles such as tape on the floor on where to stand or to pause and wave.

As far as him doing a great job, I don't know yet, we haven't seen the consequences of his decisions and likely won't know them till his administration is over. However, he is standing tall and proud in public and delivering a simple message that people are relating to, which might be a lot of his job: Appearance.

As far as Hilary, She has no need to be bitter about Bush, the Clinton didn't lose any of the important elections. However, she's bright enough to maybe see the underlying media glitter and cynical enough to comment, without necessarily having been directly in the political spotlight long enough to just keep a straight face. Or maybe she was just being evil . . .

When I look at a speech, I admire a good performance like I admire good theatre and listen to the substance (or lack there of) in it and then wait to see how it materializes later.

There is a very good book Called: "Policy paradox and political reason" that goes into a lot of this.

It behooves us as intellegent and educated Americans with the civic responsibility of voting citizens to understand the public political process and look beyond the glitz, spinning, and advertising the same way as consumers we are expected to look beyond the glamorization of products. Otherwise we suffer the same fate as uninformed or easily swayed consumers: We get a bad buy. However, in the case of public officers we can get very bad consequences that affect our way of life.

As far as Canada goes, unfortunately Canada has been so long considered either a Nation to obviously comply with British and American policy, or else to be no threat our National Security (or help either) that we tend to take them for granted.

Canadian troops were given the second most heavily defended beachhead to take during D-Day where they suffered heavy casualties, and yet they are barely mentioned in history books that are not very specific to that time of WWII.

I am now stepping off my soapbox.