As a speechwriting goon, my favorite Saturday Night Live skit is the one in which a 19th-century “critic” named Jedidiah Atkinson pans the great speeches of history.

He shits on the Gettysburg Address—Abe laid a real “Lincoln log”—and then, successively, Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” (“death, please!”), JFK’s inaugural, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Sermon on the Mount and FDR’s “boring ass” Pearl Harbor speech. After each review and before launching into his next takedown, Atkinson yells, “Next!”

Well after all the professional and amateur pregame and postgame punditry around the presidential debate last week, I’m in a Jebidiah Atkinson mood my own self.

For instance, I’m not bamboozled by a Facebook post that begins, “I don’t always agree with [so-and-so] but she’s got it right on this Harris/Trump debate …” Really? You think you can buy credibility this way? So if you, personally, don’t always agree with this person … and you, personally, happen agree with them now … then I, personally, should agree with them now, too. A little narcissistic, don’t you think? NEXT!

“I’ve been trying not to post much about politics lately, but …” See above. NEXT!

“I don’t know who needs to see this, but …” NEXT!

“I’ll just leave this right here …” NEXT!

There are leftists online. There are right-wingers. But there’s a third, and just as dishonest way to get attention you don’t deserve: to be consistently, provocatively, incorrigibly centrist. Yes, Trump talked of people of color eating pets, but Harris seemed a little nervous in the beginning. NEXT!

And finally: This one goes out to everyone on pretty much every side—and especially these insufferably vain, perpetually “open-minded,” chin-scratching, obtuse “undecided” swing voters who always still need just a little more information to decide whether they like the Cubs or the White Sox (or whether they hate all baseball teams, after all). NEXT!

My first boss Larry Ragan often dismissed “new” research that wasted money and time “telling us what we already know.” Ole Larry must have been rolling over (laughing) in his grave last week, reading this:

A New York Times analysis of a month’s worth of rally speeches from each candidate showcases Mr. Trump’s freewheeling oratory and Ms. Harris’s disciplined messaging. Using an artificial intelligence model to assess semantic similarity, The Times found that Ms. Harris’s speeches on average contained remarks that were 84 percent similar, compared with 75 percent of Mr. Trump’s.

Methodology

Data was collected for transcripts from 11 rally speeches from Ms. Harris and seven speeches from Mr. Trump between Aug. 3 and Sept. 6. The Times analyzed remarks from these transcripts using an open source text similarity model that can calculate semantic distance between pairs of text. The overall similarity percentage for each candidate was derived by examining each remark in a candidate’s speech, identifying the highest similarity score between that remark and remarks in the candidate’s other speeches, and then averaging those maximum similarity scores.

Kamala Harris gets a lot of flak for not submitting to interviews. I think she should do ’em like President Trump did the vast majority of his.