Due to a crowded schedule around here which involved a lot of dishes, we missed the broadcast of the State of the Union address. It's bizarre -- despite the fact that this non-event is essentially a long political infomercial for the governing party and sitting administration, it feels somewhat like a civic duty to watch the damn thing.

But even under Clinton, the exercise was painful: the roll-out of policy initiatives, most of which had already been trial-ballooned, was not exactly stirring political theater. Under Bush, who leans heavily on the tough-but-loving daddy approach he pulled together in late 2001, it's punchier and leaner, less weighted down by Clinton's tendency to wax long on both the details of new programs and the often overdone rhetoric meant to give them a sense of urdency. Short, one-sentence paragraphs, which lead in to applause lines. And plenty of 'em.

But Bush's punches, of course, mostly damage the already-tottering illusion that this administration cares about making any sense at all. I got around the obligation to watch the speech by going right to the teleprompter, and it's a fascinating document, with buzz-phrases, assertions, factoids, and blustery commands more or less cut-n-pasted in a long strand; the Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v keys on Karl Rove's laptop are, I suspect, pretty worn down.

Take a look at the treatment of the War in Iraq; a symptomatic recapitulation of the Administration's previous story-shifting about why we went to war -- Saddam was an imminent threat to the security of the United States/ America is called upon to free the oppressed -- about how things are going (a laundry list of our "coalition partners" comes couched in a deadpan shut-up to people who worry about our relationships with the rest of the world; this is followed by a petulant cry that "we don't need a permission slip" to defend ourselves), and about how it all connects to the War on Terror (he doesn't say, but keeps blipping back and forth between the two in a way which implies that they're the same thing without ever really specifying why).

And I haven't even gotten to the call to defend marriage -- not from homosexuals, but from liberty's greatest foe: members of the judiciary! But there's a crying daughter, and, anyway, you probably know what I'm going to say already.