This Talking Points Memo video of White House spokespeople and affiliated pundits responding to Scott McClellan's memoir What Happened is more or less the funniest thing I've seen or heard since Arnie Schoenberg and His Second Viennese School. It's a tall order to find musical justification for posting such off-topic material, but I'll give it a shot. The comedy lies, I believe, in the fact that not only do these self-styled "moderately talented people" keep saying the same things over and over, but they utter them in strikingly similar speech-melodic patterns. I could cite Janáček's pioneering work on speech-melody in the Czech language, but in this company it seems more fitting to mention Harry Partch. Notice the recurrent falling intervals of "puzzled," the melancholy stepwise-descending motif of "Not the Scott we knew" (or "doesn't sound like Scott"), the fairly consistent tuning of the word "stumped." OK, I tried....
Update: Martin Schneider at Emdashes has written out a libretto for a McClellan opera, which I'd prefer to call Puzzled.
