British MP demolishes Republican inquisition panel

Chloe posts about the recent food-for-bombs inquiry circus.

a wolf in a man suit
from everydaysketch.blogspot.com.

Galloway was splendid. Check it out if you haven't seen him live: the BBC video (see "blistering attack")

I found myself wondering why such shows of rhetoric are so rare: only a Galloway could effectively tell off the new McCarthyism for what it is.

Is it because we're so unused to the study? Or because most listeners would find it flamboyant and suspicious? The speech was damned by the disgruntled committee as a bit of theatrical fluff, as they scampered away with their tails between their legs. Will red-state Americans equally shrug off the Scots accent? Or ignore the news as usual? Time will tell if Galloway's performance was dismissed or received as a rare spark of personal genius.

But the question leads me to wonder about the vanishing of rhetorical flamboyance from politics after 1950 with an atmosphere of enforced earnesty, and the relative weight advanced rhetoric pulls now in an age when we're so unused to it. After all, Bush won largely based on his mastery of a certain rhetoric of pathos tapping exactly the idiom of the Texas preacher. I can't imagine rhetorical exercises mustering such dynamic responses as Bush and Galloway do for us in the 1890s, say, when flourish was so common.

Next question: where would the Dems find someone as good as Galloway? How many lit majors are there on the Hill?