Maybe I just have a heightened sensibility to the voice print. My mom could alter your behavior with a clearing of the throat. A British thing I suppose.

When I listen to (be generous) the debate these days, what irks is the entrenchment of so many straw men. Slap "liberal" in your string of adjectives and most of the country gets what that means. It's become a class of person like nerds were back in high school. You wouldn't want to be that.

The speaker usually steps up the word a tad, especially when the noun being modified is estimable, as in liberal constitutional scholar. Remember those "I'm Harry" t-shirts with the bullseye? How hard would it be to just call that rhetorical trick with the "l" word once and for all. It's not leprosy.

Younger people must be so turned off when they hear the back and forth which passes for importance.

What we are telling them, as they enter adult life, is that when you study hard and eventually know what you're doing, it can all be slapped down by sleight of tongue which makes you somehow the problem.

Yeah, it's those scholars ruining everything. Let's take a survey in USA Today for everything.

Time usually tells that the one whose solution was touted as the only possible one didn't have a clue and the successfully maligned had been right all along, or at least right in being willing to debate honestly.

President Bush is a great example. He'll be sauntering along in fluent, if borrowed, Permian Basin-ese and then punch up the key words like "caliphate" or "follow us here" in some kind of cowboy movie voice. Almost everything which has prospered in the short term from Dubbya's sales pitches is prime viral video fodder today. See if you too don't hear the overly intentional parts with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

Anyone who puts together a modern winning campaign for the presidency will have successfully appealed to the electorate and that, evidently, is served by presenting the most monolithic image possible.

The person for whom you will never get a chance to vote, unless there's a revolution of sorts, and who has accumulated much of the wisdom out there, has also made a slew of mistakes. Inter-personal, intellectual, business or career related and so on. That's how we wind up with personality disordered candidates.

Narcissists seem to rise at the expense of thinkers. The former can forge a hotlink to the voter's psyche, regardless of integrity, while the latter regards his willingness to be successfully disputed as the source of his.

The narcissist is always steering things to a gotcha moment, rinse, repeat, while the statesman wants what's best. (Happiness, to put it in framer's terms.)

If the more perfect union of lore seems a laughable goal by today's standards, it may well be because of the blurred lines between commercial advertising techniques and carrying on the people's business. Tell us your plan, not why your plan is the best. Isn't it we who decide ultimately?

Fair warning. I have a personality disorder of sorts, too.

Can't really handle more than a few things at once, poor appreciation of social cues, socially and emotionally inappropriate responses, misinterpretation of literal and implied meanings. Yup, I'm a guitar player.

I can't give you the commencement address this fellow Mark Danner can and did, as quoted at TomDispatch, but I can make blues appear as if by magic from a red guitar.

If you're just heading out into the world, or if you're between there and an old crabby patty, I think you can always use both.