John McCain's speech on the night Barack Obama won the Minnesota primary was excuciating to watch. Even I, a Barack supporter, felt sorry for the dude. I cringed at his inexplicably awkward smiles, his utter lack of rhetorical cadence, and the small, unenthusiastic crowd that had to be incessantly spurred to applaud by a single campaign aid who hooted and roared each time the candidate made what was supposed to be a salient point. McCain's speech was a full-fledged flop.

It's interesting how the relatively innocuous green backdrop in front of which McCain spoke ended up taking most of the blame for the terrible speech, becoming in itself a media sensation. What is even more remarkable is that this ploy at political spin wasn't carried off by the Republicans, but the "left-wing" media, specifically CNN and those rad political entertainers over at Comedy Central who excel at tickling the country's tender bourgeois feet with fluffy feathers.

Look, America: McCain's speech sucked. It had nothing to do with the green backdrop. So, then, how did that end up getting all the blame? It began right after the speech was broadcast with Paul Gergen's testy response to Jeffrey Toobin's burning criticism of it on CNN. Toobin, a relative newcomer to the Cable News Network, didn't hold back from sharing his perception of McCain's speech:


Visibly bristled by Toobin's disparagement of a man he personally likes, the more stately Gergen came back with the comment that he thought McCain "did some very clever things tonight," like verbally undermining the Obama promise of change, but added:


With that remark, McCain's disasterously delivered speech was effectively sidelined by the supposedly awful "green backdrop" behind him.

Meanwhile, over at FOX News, damage-control went into full-swing, but with a much more direct and open acknowledgement of what CNN's Toobin so indiscreetly pointed out. "Was this John Mccain at his oratorical best just in terms of delivery?" host Brit Hume asked reporter Carl Cameron. "People are going to naturally be comparing his style to Barack Obama's," replied Cameron, "and he's just not as glitzy." Speaking of Obama's rousing speech delivered an hour after McCain's, FOX pundit Mort Kondrack noted that "the oratorical gap between this speech and John McCain's was, uh, vast," adding: "John McCain sounded old." "I think we can agree that this was a speech that looked better on the printed page than it was coming from John McCain's mouth," Chris Wallace said to former Bush advisor Karl Rove. "Yeah," agreed a crestfallen Rove, "content better than delivery tonight." Interestingly, the green backdrop never came up.

But at CNN, the "green backdrop" was quickly morphing into myth--one which would absorb much of the blame for the bad speech. Following from Gergen's remark, Anderson Cooper noted it while addressing Republican strategist Alex Costellanos; among other things, he said, "having him stand in front of this green backdrop" contributed to the perception that McCain's speech was a dud, with which Castellanos agreed.

Comedy Central was all over the green backdrop then, with Stephen Colbert of Colbert Nation setting off a movement, still alive on YouTube, to replace its appearance in clips of the speech with more interesting visuals. Back at CNN, social funny-stuff reporter Jeanne Moos--who had earlier done a segment on McCain's rusty speaking skills that is still painful to watch--came out with a segment on the nation's response to the green screen, alerting people to Colbert's call to fix the speech and flooding YouTube with clever remakes showing McCain speaking in front of jungle predators and hip-hop videos.

Cute. But I'm with Toobin on this. That speech was absolutely awful and no snazzy background would have made it better.