Yeah, Bush made a speech again. I skipped it. This is about what I expected:

Two rehearsals for his prime-time speech today were not enough to keep US President George W Bush from mangling the name of the Abu Ghraib prison that brought shame to the US mission in Iraq.

During the half-hour televised address, Bush mispronounced Abu Ghraib each of the three times he mentioned it while announcing US plans to tear down the infamous jail and replace it with a new facility.

The prison, the scene of torture under Saddam Hussein and the setting for the Iraqi prison abuse scandal under the US military, has a name that English speakers usually pronounce as "abu-grabe".

But the Republican president, long known for verbal and grammatical lapses, stumbled on the first try, calling it "abugah-rayp". The second version came out "abu-garon", the third attempt sounded like "abu-garah".

White House aides, who described the speech as an important address on the future of Iraq, said Bush practised twice today before boarding his helicopter for his trip to the speaking venue at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

On the other hand, I did catch Sam Waterston's reading of Lincoln's speech at Cooper Union (you can read the full text).

Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man—such as a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do care—such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance—such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

Can anyone imagine George W. Bush writing anything like that? Can anyone even imagine him capable of reading it?

I know it's unfair to compare one of our nation's best presidents with one of its worst—but we are now a nation of about 300 million people; with that rich base of human resources, why do we have such difficulty finding people of distinction to run the country?

The author of a book on the speech, Harold Holzer, introduced the recreation with a number of comments that might explain a little bit about the decline of political discourse. At the time of Lincoln's speech, he said, "the idea that political thought...could be crammed into a single sentence was inconceivable." Audiences expected a lengthy and in-depth argument that laid out a political point; no sound bites.

It's a good speech. I found it interesting enough to listen to it for an hour and a half. Listen to it (realplayer link) and judge for yourself. I think it was a more productive exercise than listening to our Cretin-in-Chief and the yammering sycophantic pundits who followed up on him.