It could be the fists-in-eyes gesture, or eye-rolling, or-maybe there’s a smiley for it

I assume that Ezra Klein is essentially kidding around when he calls for doing away with political speeches. “Not the televised sort,” he adds, although it’s not clear to me at all what distinction there is between a televised sort and a webcast sort, and I see no reason why any speech at all, in front of the Council on Foreign Relations or the Prescott Bush Awards Dinner, shouldn’t be recorded and made available by the candidate. At very least in audio.

Anyway, I think Mr. Klein is essentially saying that it would be nice if, in addition to speeches, the candidates would make position papers available and then answer questions about them, essentially having press conferences on specific position papers. They could do that, certainly, if the press would report on them. But if Mr. Klein really doesn’t think that there’s any “value added” by having a speech actually delivered, face to face, by an actual person, well then, I weep for him.

No, I don’t weep. It’s hyperbole. Well, and it isn’t just hyperbole, it’s pathopoeia, but it’s also diatyposis and charientismus, and it’s ethos, and indignatio, and aganactesis, and meiosis, and it could be mycterismus but you can’t see me, can you?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.