This is oddly . . . sacred.

When Paul Rudnick is on, he's on. From last week's New Yorker: Running Mates. In the physical magazine, it immediately followed this Philip Gourevitch article, called "Bushspeak", which is also good. Excerpt:

[Bush] is grossly underestimated as an orator by those who presume that good grammar, rigorous logic, and a solid command of the facts are the essential ingredients of political persuasion, and that the absence of these skills indicates a lack of intelligence. Although Bush is no intellectual, and proud of it, he is quick and clever, and, for all his notorious malapropisms, abuses of syntax, and manglings or reinventions of vocabulary, his intelligence is—if not especially literate—acutely verbal. ****** Bush has created a language of his own—as austere and strange as that of David Mamet or Samuel Beckett, with whom he shares a taste for speaking in spare absolutes that can sound simultaneously profound and absurd. “The world changed on a terrible September morning, and since that day we have changed the world,” he said, and, as he enumerated the changes, he kept returning to a refrain: “And America and the world are safer.” In Iraq, he said, “I saw a threat.” September 11th had taught him not to let a threat materialize. Congress and the U.N. agreed with him that Saddam Hussein had to be brought to heel. “The world spoke,” Bush said. Saddam remained defiant. America acted. “Knowing what I know today, I would have made the same decision,” he proclaimed, and with that he launched into an attack on Kerry’s shifting positions on Iraq.