State of the Union: Zzzzzz

"While Kaine was droning on, I closed my eyes and imagined Jack Murtha giving the response, someone with the authority to do much more than second guess -- to offer an alternative strategy on Iraq and the war on terror, as opposed to Kaine's program of 'service and competent management.' And I thought 'competence' had gone out of vogue with Michael Dukakis.

"As for the Kaine bromide, 'common sense solutions to common problems' -- who came up with that one? Fire them immediately. Please."

Seems nobody much liked the Democrats, either.

Even the New York Post's John Podhoretz concedes that "George W. Bush gave the least consequential major speech of his presidency -- and it was a brilliant political stroke.

"Substantively, the State of the Union message was pretty much a bust -- with an entitlements commission here, a Competitiveness Initiative there, here a commission, there an initiative, everywhere a commission and an initiative. Rhetorically, it wasn't all that memorable -- save for his line about America being addicted to oil, which was catchy but essentially pointless.

"But politically it had two virtues. First was the Hippocratic virtue: Nothing he proposed last night will do any harm to him. Whether Commission A or Initiative B is welcomed or rejected by Congress, it won't matter much.

"Its second virtue was that it allowed him to spend a good deal of time reassuring a nervous public that he was focused on the primary tasks at hand."

Ah, what a genius: He proposed nothing of consequence! Nothing to shoot at!

Slate's John Dickerson finds something that eluded most pundits:

"I'm already feeling a little tricked by the speech. Not because there wasn't much talk about the austere budget cuts that are coming in the next few days. I'm suspicious because of all the pre-speech talk about how the president would push for a new 'civil tone.' I assumed he would offer a more conciliatory one. Instead, Bush was harsher and more partisan than last year...

"He depicted those who oppose him as lazy, retreating, and negative . . . He welcomes criticism in theory. But in practice, he sees it all as defeatism, second-guessing, and 20-20 hindsight."

They weren't exactly cheering in New Orleans, and neither was Craig Crawford :