new once again.

McCain s choice to pre-announce very last evening on Letterman vag com gave me the political edition of the acid flashback to this unforgettable second. The go didn t do a lot to help Bob Dole with the age situation, as I recall. But at the very least nobody was waving hams this time.




His Lips Moved, But….

Ladies and Gentlemen, the state of the Union is.is.is.
If you clicked on your television several hours ago hoping to hear the President of the United States finish that sentence, and in doing so give you a sensible and coherent framework for understanding the complex and sometimes frightening world you inhabit, you listened for 53 minutes, and you listened in vain. The nation George W. Bush described in his final State of the Union address to Congress bore a fairly strong resemblance to the nation as we knew it back in, say, 2003, but it could not be passed off as a vision of the America we see in January 2008. Similarly, the agenda he outlined had a musty whiff to it; it was so full of hardy perennials, of ideas whose time had come and long since gone, that an observer was left wondering if some speechwriters assistant mistakenly loaded the wrong text into the teleprompter with the unexpected result that Bush delivered the whole thing without ever noticing that the words he spoke had been spoken (by him) before, and were oddly detached from both current events and current attitudes.
Perhaps that seems overly critical, maybe even unfair. It is true that unlike in previous years President Bush began his address by praising the opposition for its cooperation in passing a bipartisan economic stimulus package of measures to address the recession-is-only-a-matter-of-time economy. He lexia 3 did acknowledge that times are tough for some Americans, and he did respond to the pox-on-both-houses antipathy caused by the profligate government spending weve seen in the epidemic of earmarks over the past decade. He promised the withdrawal this year of some 20,000 American