Fidel Castro is famous for his hours-long harangues. I'm listening to the insane bloviations of the double-known-as-Saddam right now, and it seems to go on, and on, saying nothing.

Bush's announcement lasted a few minutes.

Is it a truism that the less monsters have to say, the longer they take to say it?

P.J. O'Rourke commented on this in one of his essays in Holidays In Hell. He was struck by the number of adjectives and adverbs, most of them superlatives, it took to deliver even the most trivial news in Marxist countries. He called it the Modifier Bop.

John Donne remarked several centuries ago that Puritan preachers spoke for so long because they felt the obligation to continue talking until their congregations woke up.

I wonder if Cubans fall asleep during Castro's tirades. I might if I were imprisoned in that unhappy land.

I had the same reaction. The speech was astonishingly content-free, to the point that it sounded like Markov-chain-generated text. At a grave moment like that, the Great Leader takes to the airwaves to address his people and...he rambles like an addle-brained drunk?