The cost of Obama's speeches

Well, besides the obvious trillions of dollars in spending he's been able to finagle out of Congress, it appears that our President has been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars --on no-bid contracts that he promised he wouldn't use, by the way--on speechwriters and (hilariously) a consultant who is most famous for teaching Hillary Clinton how to use a teleprompter.  (H/T Northern Muckraker)

No, I am not making this up.  Apparently the smartest lawyer, evah, from Arkansas needed help mastering the nuances of reading words from a screen.  And apparently, so does President Obama, to the tune of a hundred grand.  (my freshman English teacher, Mrs. Robbins, can help for free; "Mr. Perry, do not verbalize your pauses with an 'um', and make eye contact with your audience.  Thank you, young man.")

What can we infer from this?  Well, in days of yore, virtually any educated man or woman would expect to be called upon to give a passable speech in the course of their professional or personal life, and in days of yore, these ordinary people would be able to do this under one condition; they had to believe what they were saying.  It was only the select few that could, without descending into the genre of the shaggy dog story, give a persuasive speech which they knew to be deceptive.

And in this, I think we have the reason why so many politicians spend so much on speech consultants. 

Want an example of how the speech consultants appear to be pulling Mr. Obama's bacon out of the pan?  Here's Michelle Malkin's column about the ever-changing stories about the death of Osama Bin Laden.  OK, the consultants obviously aren't papering things over perfectly, but the fact remains that the mainstream media aren't screaming "get your story together!" at Dear Leader.  In Obama's mind, those consultants are worth every penny and more.