A State of The Union is Maryland!

"You can look it up! Fact check it!"

Well, anyway, that would have been better than this mishmash of past speeches, nods towards fixing problems he wouldn't possibly touch (like energy policy, for example), meaningless rhetoric about a "hopeful America," and basically a lot of talk. Whatever. I can't get excited about these kinds of speeches anymore because I've heard them all before and they produce little results. His credibility is strained with me, to say the least. Although I think he's got the animal/human hybrid cloning crowd on the run now. That's bold leadership, to stand up to the powerful "half-man, half-horse" lobby.

Tim Kaine, on the other hand, I hadn't heard before. I thought he pretty much spoke to the businessman in all of us. It was a simple call for good and efficient government. This republic is literally dying for that after the last five years. I can't stand the whole "better way" thing, but running on good government (which dovetails nicely with culture of corruption) can work.

However, there was precious little on Iraq and national security. Talking about body armor and butting veteran's benefits is great, but they picked someone who could only paint foreign policy in domestic terms. Not good considering that is such a perceived weakness. Overall, this wasn't a speech that I would have given, but I understood its focus and thought it did its job.

HuffPo has a roundup of Democratic repsonses. I hope they try to get all over television today. There's a lot of hay to be made linking Bush's words with reality.

UPDATE: Reading through the HuffPo stuff, I have to say I totally agree with Craig Crawford.

A major metropolitan area wiped nearly off the face of the Earth, and it merits only six sentences on the next-to-last page of the President's State of the Union Address?!?!? Can there be any more proof that the federal government is washing its hands of the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Dozens and dozens of paragraphs on rebuilding other nations, but barely a mention of New Orleans.

Well, why call attention to your failures, I guess. Still, should ANYONE in this country be satisfied with that?