Chatterbox

Riverrun I Feel Your Pain

Chatterbox has just discovered the Political Babble Generator, which creates a new synthetic speech by Bill Clinton every ten minutes by endlessly rearranging three-word phrases that appear in real Clinton speeches. The effect, which is akin to reading Finnegans Wake as written by an unusually slick Arkansas-born graduate of Yale Law School, is strangely hypnotic. (You can also get political babble using Newt Gingrich’s favorite phrases, but he’s old news.) Here are some excerpts from a computer-generated Clinton speech that Chatterbox yanked off the site on May 6 at 5:11 p.m.:

I have learned again the world’s strongest economic power; almost 6 million new jobs since I was walking off, and that man grabbed me by the commission headed by former congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are at peace, and freedom, and democracy. We still can’t be strong at home and abroad. We must continue to implement the agreement we have to act, not for the first time since Harry Truman lived in the previous four years. Auto sales are way up, home sales at a 40-year low. That’s not my idea of how the new Congress opened its doors, lobbyists were still doing business as usual–the PTA, the town hall meeting, the ball park it’s hard for the rest of my family …

For the 12 years of trickle down economics we built a false prosperity on a hollow base as our national debt quadrupled. From 1989 to 1992 we experienced the slowest growth in a world of changes so profound and rapid that all nations are tested. Our American heritage has always been our ability to answer some questions from within, from the manual typewriter …