SOTU

I've got nothing stunningly profound to say about the president's speech. It looked to me like he basically phoned it in, which might be a common occurrence during his second term. Extraordinarily lucky for Bush however, was the spontaneous photo-op of the dead soldier's mother hugging the Iraqi woman. For everything that was wrong and remains wrong about the administration's Iraq policy, is it possible to wish that that woman had never been able to vote freely?

What else? Bush is plainly lying through his teeth about his budgetary math, and it looks like the Newspeak idiom of "personalization" is in full effect---which makes Bush against "privatization" no matter how strongly he is for privatization, a cool trick to pull off if you ever get to be president.

Railing against "activist judges" is standard Republican discourse, but I was a bit surprised that Bush is still hawking the FMA specifically. We now know for sure that Bush was not an anti-gay bigot when he was a college student, and I find it unlikely that he has become a bigot in the intervening 30 years---and he'll never run for another office again---so the combination of cynicism and cowardice involved in his continued advocacy of a constitutional validation of gay bashing is rather staggering. On this count, the problem with Bush is definitely not his ideals; it's his courage, and this SOTU dispels for me any lingering doubt over whether or not there is a single domestic policy point on which Bush will stand up to James Dobson. I suppose that in his own mind, Bush justifies compromise with the Dobsonian faction of the right on the grounds that he needs their support in order to continue to fight the war, but even if you take that calculation as plausible, there's an obvious looming problem: In four years, Bush will not be president; and the forces he mobilized and unleashed in the past election are not going to suddenly demobilize.