All my liberal friends (I'm a liberal, and in Los Angeles, where it's easy to be) have a raging hard on for Obama. I'll hold my nose and cast that vote, exercising a more than philosophically illusory choice this November; but he's not Gravel -- he's not even Kucinich -- so I don't give a fuck beyond NOT voting for a worthless, despicable, WASPy, bought-and-paid-for Republican. The knee-jerk rebuttal to my complaints about what an empty, masturbatory exercise in hollow rhetoric these A-list political speeches are is that he is, in fact, a "great speaker(tm)." Are you daft, people? Can you not tell signal from noise?

It's as bad as a religious service.