But for those people who often find his orations (and sometimes even his off the cuff remarks) inspiring – the thrills go up the leg to the tear ducts. We’re touched! In the heads!! Right? Gentlemen start your mocking…

Ahh heck, why bother? Benj, I think you’re a well meaning guy and no slouch, but to my mind you’ve been willingly bamboozled by a snake-oil salesman.

I dunno, maybe it’s me, but I never for a split second saw Obama’s vaunted speech giving talent as anything other than tedious bombast. I just don’t get it. I never got Clinton either. Everyone saying how great he was at the podium. My reaction within ten seconds of seeing him for the first time was “god, what an oily phony.” And that never changed. Ugh, the lip gnawing, the thumb-thing (which, by the way, Palin does).

I don’t find Palin a great orator either, but when she talks there’s nothing salesman-like — er, salesperson-like — in her. Nothing of the con artist, the flim flam man. Or, as my boy Melville had it, the Confidence Man. She’s just she. McCain is a bit like that as well, though he’s been in the mill for too long and become too much a player to be truly genuine.

Well let’s let Herman M have the last word. From “The Confidence Man,” good words for Obama supporters, or any followers of Leftist bunkum.

Not very unlike the experience of the man that built himself a palace of moon-beams, and when the moon set was surprised that his palace vanished with it.

But the novel ends with the prophetic and admonitory words….

Something further may follow of this Masquerade.