By Matt Taibbi

John Kerry had to give the speech of his life—and he did.

—Mark Shields, PBS political analyst, minutes after Kerry's acceptance speech in Boston

After listening to John Kerry's acceptance address last week, I did a little experiment. I decided to remove everything that was bullshit and see what was left. I invite New York Press readers to follow me on this journey, step by step.

I admit to using the widest possible interpretation of bullshit. Bullshit can be outright lies, bullshit can be calculating come-ons, and bullshit can be self-aggrandizing self-mythology, which is more commonly known in this country as self-aggrandizing bullshit.

I acted on all of these varieties of bullshit, but I also went a little further.

I edited out phony religiosity (pious bullshit) and pointless political platitudes of the sort that could be used by any politician in any situation, including Hitler (i.e., "We're the optimists": meaningless bullshit). I also chopped out all gratuitous flag-waving (patriotic bullshit), all forced and hollow tough-talking (saber-rattling bullshit), and all draping of the clearly unworthy self in the ill-fitting cloak of the great figures of history (name-dropping bullshit).

Further down the line were the intellectual crimes. Lies went out right away, but I also cut out things that were not lies exactly, but mere words. Also banished were the many species of literary fraud—from facile generalizations to redundancies to such crass, hypersentimental, factory-generated cliches as "trees [are] the cathedrals of nature." There were also many shades of disingenuousness to deal with, most of which came into play when Kerry levied attacks against George Bush—but more on that later.

I wasn't sure where to start, so I decided to first go after what one might call typical campaign bullshit, which includes such standbys as callow patriotism, syrupy talk about love of our vast and beautiful country and Hallmark-y references to the flag and the wonder and might of our armed services. Also targeted here were those nauseating constants of modern campaign speeches, the bald paeans to focus-group words like hope, the future, freedom, change, truth, pride, values and heroes.

A typical victim of this stage of the elimination progress was a line like, "I felt goose bumps as I got off a military train and heard the Army band strike up 'Stars and Stripes Forever,'" which actually could have been struck on three or four grounds—there were two army references, a flag plug and a fake memory of a fake emotion. I-can't-believe-somebody-actually-wrote-this lines like, "I learned the pride of our freedom" were similarly double- or triple-eliminated.

In some cases, this set of cuts blitzed out whole paragraphs, as in the case of the diffidently delivered, "We have it in our power to change the world again. But only if we're true to our ideals and that starts by telling the truth to the American people. That is my first pledge to you tonight. As President, I will restore trust and credibility to the White House."

Cut around the edges here, and this is just a straight focus-group word list: power, change, truth, ideals, truth, pledge, trust, credibility. It can all go in the bin.

At times Kerry's determination to ram buzzwords down the audience's throat caused his speech to dissemble into near-total incoherence. Just look at passages like the following:

For four years, we've heard a lot of talk about values. But values spoken without actions taken are just slogans. Values are not just words. They're what we live by. They're about the causes we champion and the people we fight for. And it is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families.

This sounds like it makes sense at first reading, but upon closer examination it's actually maddening gibberish. A rough translation would begin like this: "It is meaningless to merely say one has values without backing it up, but yet we say—we have values. Values are real. You know what I mean. Let's talk about causes you champion [which causes?] and people you fight for [which people?]."

Then, having arrived at this whatever-values-float-your-boat point of the passage, Kerry uses the old "to make America better, we must first better America," technique to simply flip values over on its back like a turtle and watch as its legs flail around in the air: "And it is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families."

An accurate translation would go like this:

Some people don't have values. That's wrong. Values are real. Values are whatever you think they are. And it is high time for you to watch as I turn this turtle over on its back.

In some cases Kerry's over-reliance on fuzzy, grammatically promiscuous words like "about" to mask the list-like nature of his rhetoric was so obvious, it was embarrassing. Some passages read like army color-blindness tests, which may in fact be where Kerry stole the idea from: If you squinted hard enough to avoid seeing the connecting words, you could make out the underlying message.

Take this passage, which is Kerry-ese for the human sentence Elections, choices, choices, values, policies, programs, principle:

My fellow citizens, elections are about choices. And choices are about values. In the end, it's not just policies and programs that matter; the president who sits at that desk must be guided by principle.

Again, this sounds like it makes sense. But when you think about it, what is he really saying? "The president ought to have principles." After two-hundred-plus years, we still need someone to step up to a podium to tell us that? Are we fucking children, or what?

By my count Kerry had about 175 words' worth of references to his religious beliefs, which accounted for roughly 3.5 percent of the speech. I struck all of them on the grounds that I simply do not believe that Kerry is a religious man. Kerry is probably religious in the way that a person who has to be reminded to invite God to a ball is religious. I will eat my own foot if it ever comes out that he really "humbly prays," as he said he does in his speech.

By comparison, I believe that George Bush sincerely believes he believes in God. When Bush talks about Jesus, even die-hard Jesus people buy it. I know I buy it, because it scares the shit out of me. But when Kerry talks about God, even James Carville probably thinks his makeup is wrong or his lines need a little tweaking. Take this passage:

But faith has given me values and hope to live by, from Vietnam to this Page 1 | 2 | 3 | Next Page