WEDNESDAY: All we humans secretly want...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2026

...is a chance to talk about this: We had planned to write, this afternoon, about the remarkable strength of the rhetoric.

The remarkable strength of Jon Ossoff's rhetoric. The remarkable strength of this:

SENATOR OSSOFF (8/16/26): In this White House, they view persistence in deceit as a virtue. You hear me, Atlanta?

And there's something uniquely despicable about lying a nation into war. Treating citizens as fools, and those who serve as pawns.

Aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, they've now been at sea for 240-plus days without a port call. It's a Navy record. And still—and still—

And still, they serve with excellence. 

And still, they serve with excellence! God bless the sailors, Marines, aviators and all aboard the United States Ship Abraham Lincoln! 

AUDIENCE: [Cheers]    

See, they don't expect luxury. They'll endure hardship. But they deserve competent leaders who send them into combat only when necessary, and with decisive clarity of purpose, not fools who lie about the purpose and progress of war.  

And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs, and trades stocks. 

See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.   

To watch the speech, just click this. That passage starts at the 7:30 mark.

Good God! "They view persistence in deceit as a virtue?" Especially as delivered, that's a brilliant formulation.

And then, after praising the greatness of us the people—after praising the greatness of we who serve—he actually delivered this string of stinging insults:

While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs, and trades stocks.

See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.

"He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar?"

"On their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar?" Wow:

Like waves rolling in when you might even drown, those final twelve (12) words, all by themselves, deliver one stinging insult after another. And the fact that you've never heard anyone else say it that way suggests the possibility that he actually means it!

David Axelrod laments the presence of two widely cited words: 

"With Natalie." 

In a tweet, he says this:   

AXELROD (8/19/26): No one has been more consistently eloquent or incisive in exposing @realDonaldTrump than @Ossoff. The paragraph from his weekend speech that has gotten so much attention was a brutal takedown.

But two words in it, "with Natalie" seemed gratuitous and unnecessary.

They juiced the virality of it, I'm sure. Probably thrilled some in the base, who figured it was just giving Trump a taste of his own nasty medicine.

But they distracted and detracted from the power of the message.   

We agree with the words we've highlighted. That said, should Ossoff have included the two words in question? 

We can teach it flat or round.  

Of one thing you can be sure. Many people "in the base," and certainly in the mainstream press, did in fact hear nothing except those two thrilling words. 

It's what we were told, long ago, by a major player inside the Bill Clinton re-election campaign:  

It's all about the girl, she (very) sadly said, as the Lewinsky excitement was breaking. 

She meant that the national press wanted to talk about nothing else—were going to talk about nothing else. It's clear from much of the current reaction that many of us the people today are reacting in a similar way.

We'd call that human, not wrong. Meanwhile, there's the enduring madness of the rhetoric favored by Steven Cheung. Let's consider that tomorrow.