[direct reply to "and other politician's aren't [stupid]?", but intervening replies came in while typing...]They're something or other...
Personally, I don't like the prefacing of all statements with "[...and] what I would [like to] say to you", or similar, that regularly gets an airing in debates-for-broadcast statements here in the UK. Maybe it's something to exclaim[1], while the actual words that follow are still being formed, internally checked for obvious blooper-fodder and perhaps dredging the internal thesaurus for some weasel-word to 'inadvertently' insult the aforementioned speaker with...
But I always hear it as "And what I
would like to say is <bad thing is bad, good thing is good, etc>...", but leaving the unsaid proposition that they
can't actually do it, for some reason[2]... but this way it sounds like they
are doing. A bit like the bit right near the beginning of the Foundation series where someone diplomatic came and spoke platitudes at the (First) Foundation, but when what he said was semantically analysed it came out as absolutely nothing...
But that's politicians for you. Even the best of them have to do this. Anyone who umms and ahhs
too early on in their prospective political trajectories never get much further. A 'Peter Principle' for public office. There are very few exceptions. (Although I highly suspect Boris Johnson is "Too dumb to be dumb", in this regard. After being rude about an
entire city's population, and being ordered to go there and apologise by his party leader, he goes and sabotages his own apologies by saying the wrong thing
again... "Ohhh Boris...". Probably didn't hurt him being made Mayor of an entirely different city, of course... Like I said in another thread, all he needs to do is mess up in the Olympics
really badly[3], permanently emigrate to the US within the next cpuple of years and it could be "Boris for POTUS, 2028!")
[1] Nigel Firage (sp?) of UKIP is very good at Exclaiming. As if he's talking to the back of a village hall or an outdoors croed, from atop a literal soap-box, unplugged and without any electronic amplification
even when he's speaking into a radio microphone on a radio programme. Just one of the things I don't like about him, the way he's louder (and, presumably, thinks that makes him more convincing)...
[2] Things-Wot-The-Public-Ought-Not-To-Know, perhaps. Or We-Won't-Be-Able-To-Afford-It. Or My-Party-And-Me-Disagree-On-This-Issue.
[3] Although almost anything he does will almost certainly be an "Oooh Boris, not again..." thing, forgiven by most people, so this'd have to be
really bad. Do you think he was the one who arranged for the South Korean flag to be used for the North Korean team, earlier?