Arrrrrrrrggghhh!

Man, if I have to hear Tim Kaine say "There's a better way" again, I am going to scream. I don't mind that he's pug-nosed. I do mind that he has all the charisma of a half-dried bucket of concrete and gave a speech that totally refused to engage.

Is this the best we can do? Is this robotic, lukewarm, incoherent, stingless "response" that didn't actually answer anything specific that Bush said tonight all we can come up with? It's almost as if Kaine is deliberately making his speech boring to overcome the president's time advantage -- he only got 10 minutes, but he made it feel like an eternity. Was John Kerry washing his hair tonight? Did Barack Obama have to rush off to a party afterwards? Did John Edwards have to get his beauty sleep in to maintain his youthful appearance?

As for the rest of the SoTU, I honest didn't find much that was blogworthy. Yes, there were many, many moments when I wanted to tear my hair out. Other moments where I was glad I made a strong alcoholic beverage just for the occasion. But basically, nothing I didn't expect. There goes the Amazing Chimpy, promising all sorts of wonderful things while pushing his appallingly irresponsible tax cuts. There he goes artfully talking about failed states, democracy building and 9/11 all in one breath, implying artfully the link between Iraq and 9/11 without connecting the dots. The interesting thing was, the pundits on MSNBC actually remarked upon it, as well as Bush's deft way of tacking "for the troops" or something at the end of an applause line about Iraq to force the Democrats to stand and clap. They totally picked up on it, but they didn't call Bush on it. They merely observed it with a faintly amused air and moved on, as if lying to the American people through cheap debating tactics was rather clever of the usually leaden G.W.

By the way, this lying by implication thing is working so well for Bush in terms of estabilishing the spurious link between Iraq and 9/11, I think the Bushies are making greater use of this gambit -- for instance, in a thinly veiled attack on stem cell research, Bush talked about the need to stop cloning, estabilishing embryos for research and human-animal hybrids. Wha??? As Gene said at the time, "has this guy confused reality for The Island of Dr. Moreau?" Great. Soon we'll be seeing polls showing most American believe there is a link between stem cell research and cloning batboys.

Oh, and not once in the speech, nor the rebuttal, nor the part of the MSNBC reaction interview with DiFi that I caught did anyone mention the gross corruption scandals that is enveloping the GOP right now. I guess noone thought it's all that important that so many Republican members of the senate are coming under investigation for bribetaking.