My Freedom of Information Request....

[garybeck]

If I could ask for one thing under the Freedom of Information Act, I would ask for it to be revealed who actually WROTE all the statements that are made by Senators and Representatives when they speak at the podium in the House and the Senate.

Lately I've noticed that seemingly NO ONE speaks from their own mind. They are all just reading a script. A lot of times I see them stumbling through the text, squinting down to read what it says. Often they seem disconnected to what they are reading, emphasizing the wrong word in a sentence, ... Like they had never read it before... (as an example, look at Joe Lieberman just before Franken shut him up yesterday...)

Even the President rarely speaks without the teleprompters... and while he's often praised for his oratory abilities, if you look closely sometimes it appears he's just reading text... he might as well be reading the newspaper, and I'm not always convinced it's coming from his heart, or even him at all.

It reminds me of when you go to a play "reading" and all the actors and actresses are holding the scripts in their hands because they haven't memorized their parts yet. Sometimes the representatives barely even look up because they have to focus on the paper in front of them or they'll lose their spot.

What the fuck? Did they write it or did someone just hand it to them? Why don't we just build some fucking robots to read the scripts for them?

And who wrote that shit anyway? Why should we assume that the representative actually wrote it? Why should we assume that one of their staffers wrote it? How do we know some of this shit isn't being written up in late night smoke-filled rooms by the DLC or some other group?

If I could submit one Freedom of Information Act request, I'd ask that all of the original author of all these script sheets have to be made public, otherwise, they should speak without a script.