Yet another unnecessary postscript to the 2004 election.

French-Looking, Ennui-Sounding
The Washington Post's Richard Morin reports on an amusing study in which University of Texas researchers "collected transcripts of 271 televised interviews, news conferences, town hall meetings and candidate debates conducted in 2004" and, by cataloging "subtle but distinctive linguistic patterns," made various comparisons of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Kedwards:

Cheney easily sounded the smartest of the four, while Edwards and Bush favored the least sophisticated language patterns, Slatcher and his colleagues report in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Research in Personality. When it came to sounding presidential, both Bush and his running mate scored
considerably higher than Kerry or Edwards. Bush was the oldest-sounding candidate. Edwards also was the most likely to use feminine speech patterns and "female" words (Bush was a close second), while Cheney sounded most like a man's man.

The vice president sounded the most honest of the four, and Kerry the least. Kerry's language also was most like that of a depressed person, followed by Edwards.

John Kerry* has an op-ed in today's New York Times that isn't quite a suicide note but is certainly downcast. "We find our troops in the middle of an escalating civil war," he says, referring to Iraq, then invokes Vietnam, the war that was won thanks to Kerry's heroism:

Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America's leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion.

He urges that "we get tough with Iraqis," but he has an odd idea of what this means:

Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military. If Iraqis aren't willing to build a unity government in the five months since the election, they're probably not willing to build one at all. The civil war will only get worse, and we will have no choice anyway but to leave.

If Iraq's leaders succeed in putting together a government, then we must agree on another deadline: a schedule for withdrawing American combat forces by year's end.

So Kerry's idea of getting tough is to threaten to run away. No wonder he's depressed!

* Michael Dukakis's former lieutenant governor. (Thanks to Best of the Web Today for the heads up.)