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| Wolfowitz and the others — | I count Wolfowitz, | I lead with him,
| because he's sort of the, | he's the genius in the background, |he's the
man, | very articulate, | very persuasive — | and so Shinseki testifies |
we need a couple hundred thousand | and everybody's mad at him, | it's
about two weeks before the war, | and it made sense, | everybody said, |
they were mad | because he's talking about numbers | these guys say you
won't need. | They're going to go invade Iraq | and you know the story,
| they were going to be greeted with flowers | and all that stuff, | we all
know that story. | But it wasn't that. | Their complaint with Shinseki
was really much more interesting. | It was: | didn't he get it? | Didn't he
know what we've been talking about, | in the tank with the JCS | and the
generals — | didn't he get it? | We could do it with five thousand troops,
| we have to make these bargains | with these crazy Clintonized generals
— | I'm talking like Rummy, | like Rumsfeld would talk — | literally, |
unfortunately — | these soft generals, | these Clintonized generals — |
didn't Shinseki get it? | Didn't he understand what we're doing here? | We
did it in Afghanistan, | we're going to do it in Iraq. | Some Special Forces,
| some bombing, | we're going to take it over. | It's going to be like this.
| He didn't get it, | that was the problem, | that's why they had to read
him out. | He wasn't on the team. | And so you have a government that
basically has been operating since 9/11 very successfully on the principle
that if you're with us you're a genius, if you're against us you're not just
somebody [in the] loyal opposition, you're a traitor. They can't deal with
you. I'm exaggerating very slightly.”
[The bars ('|') have been inserted
to mark a chunk boundary.]
This is the talk of a highly educated man addressing an educated
audience, but it is very fragmented and quite different in form from
what he would write in an article for publication. It reads more like
a sequence of almost random thoughts, or small disjointed chunks
of meaning, which when strung together begin to create a coherent
image. It would take on a very different appearance if printed on a
page, yet we argue here that this is
not
ill-formed. It is an excellent
example of how information is best transmitted through speech to a
present audience. The sequence is optimized to allow feedback after
each small chunk (or 'niblet' as we shall propose later) of meaning.
When reading through text on a page, the eye can scan back
and forth to reconstruct the author's intended meaning, but with
one-dimensional information such as speech, the structure of its
content must be shown in real-time through chunking and prosody.
The structure of this monologue is optimized for the ear. It reflects
the forms used by ordinary people when they speak in everyday
conversation, and although it is not ungrammatical per se, it employs
a different form of grammar from written text. The speaker is adjusting
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