Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good, or vice versa?

So there's this fella named Hugh Hewitt. He's a right-winger who, near as I can tell, seems to specialize in setting up false premises. His response to the president last night began,

A Good Speech by a Good Man
September 15, 2005 06:45 PM EST
Perfect pitch returned tonight, and the president's looks backward and forward were on target.

I want to see if I can talk a little bit about that, and I need you to take my word that I am "speaking" calmly and with genuine curiosity as my motivator. I shall try to refrain from cheap shots, and stem the rising tide of bile in my mouth when I read that George W. Bush even spoke the word compassion--

But what I'm wondering is this:

Does anybody really believe any of that?

Really?

A good speech? Here I'll admit something: I didn't watch it. I can't watch George W. Bush speak. I even close my eyes sometimes during clips on The Daily Show. Why? Two quotes explain it better than I can right now:

"I have an enjoyment of language...Reverence? Well, I probably do, because I go into a kind of pain when it's used loosely and inaccurately."--Tom Stoppard, in conversation.

This is also why I can't watch most movies or TV shows, with some exceptions:

BARTLET
Words, when spoken out loud for the sake of performance, are music. They have rhythm, and pitch, and timbre, and volume. These are the properties of music, and music has the ability to find us and move us, and lift us up in ways that literal meanings can't. Do you see?

ABBEY
You are an oratorical snob.

BARTLET
Yes I am, and God loves me for it.
--Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing, "War Crimes"

For me, watching George W. Bush speak is like watching a chimpanzee play with one of those little games where you try to make little ball bearings fall into holes. It's like listening to a tone-deaf singer.

I've seen him speak enough times to know that unless looked at through a glowing haze of fairy dust, as it is my knee-jerk response to assume most of those still in his camp are doing, he is never going to be FDR or Lincoln when it comes to reaching people through oratory. It's just not his bag.

And reading a transcript of last night's address, I try as hard as I can to play fair. I even tried imagining Martin Sheen was speaking it. Didn't last, the two styles are too different.

My first problem is that I can't unknow what I know. About where money tends to go in Bush's administration. About the level of competence with which he does almost everything. And about his...original relationship with truth and ethics.

Many of Bush's statements are perfectly fine if taken by themselves, at face value, with no knowledge of the actions surrounding them. Nixon was good at that too; if you ever get a chance to hear a recording of his first Inaugural Address, it's a magnificent speech. Written largely, I believe, by William Safire, though Nixon delivered it well. In it, he said:

When we listen to "the better angels of our nature," we find that they celebrate the simple things, the basic things—such as goodness, decency, love, kindness.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another—until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

There's not a word of that I can argue with--but if you read your history, you know that Nixon didn't mean a word of it.

My second problem is that, as implied above, it seems to me that to see Bush's remarks last night as a great speech you really have to want to see it as a great speech. I guess that comes back to the fairy dust crack I made above, and I know I said I was going to try to avoid cheap shots.

But it's beyond me, sometimes, it really is. Reading it, this seems to me a speech that will not stand, and certainly didn't sing.

For all the jokes I make, I really don't want to believe that all republicans are that blind or that uncaring. But sometimes, they leave me little choice. George W. Bush a good man? Really? I'm not trying to be a wiseacre here, at least not as much as usual. I mean: Really?

I'm trying to avoid the temptation of a list of crimes. Even if they were his only weakness, as The Smiths would sing, it seems the crimes have to be giant and vast for the country to listen. Besides, if you've been reading this blog more than a week, you've heard it before. Probably you could join in on the choruses.

On a scale that (no offense to any perfectly nice ones who may be in the audience) even conservatives can comprehend...George W. Bush is a bad man. And...there's something genuinely scary about the thought that there are some people who either will not see that...or see it, and don't care.