(I actually had a request to talk about politics on the blog, so I’ll give that some focus. If you don’t like that sort of thing, talk amongst yourselves for a while.)

I think everyone knows what “snafu” stands for, right? The PG-13 version is “Situation Normal: All Fouled Up”. Why couldn’t the president just have said that for a State of the Union address? It would make the Guinness book for the shortest presidential speech ever, and would be likely to be entered for the most concise and accurate one as well.

I didn’t watch the State of the Union address, because I didn’t quite have the heart to. It’s hard to watch those speeches. They do tend to go on a bit, and there’s the constant farce of which side of the aisle is applauding, standing up, scowling, picking their teeth or whatever. The first time I heard a post-speech report on how many standing ovations the president got, I thought it was just silly. Nope, turns out I’m the one who’s silly. Standing-O reportage is news, dadgummit! The fact that it’s about as spontaneous as a performance of MacBeth hardly matters, right? “Oh my, stop the presses. MacBeth AND his wife died! Who’d have thought it??”

They even knew what the president was going to say. Now, really. What’s the point of giving the speech if the talking points have been circulating all day long? At some point in time, a State of the Union address must’ve been a significant event. It’s really no one’s fault, I suppose, if the technology we have now has made it extraneous. Everyone who’s listening has access to news, information and analysis 24/7. We all know what the state of the union is — it’s messed up, and none of us can agree as to what to do about the worst things going on right now.

So why would the president saying things are messed up be news? And why would we be surprised when he offers ideas that will undoubtedly be dismissed with a loud phthah! noise from more than half of Congress? The only ones who seem perpetually surpised by these foregone conclusions are the news media, to judge from the breathless way they tell us about it.

What a mess. And the depressing thing right now is that there’s no end in sight. It doesn’t seem that there’s a single Republican in congress who has a strong, unapologetic conservative worldview. Where are our shriekers, sulkers, podium-pounders and bullies? Where’s our Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton? We’ve got one flip-flopping hothead (McCain) and a lot of numbskulls who hope to goodness no one ever asks them anything hard. I don’t say I want our guys (and gals!) to stop acting like grown-ups and get into the mudhole with the other children. But it would do my heart good to hear anything from them that sounded like they got it, that they understood that these are real decisions with real consequences, and that our culture can’t survive much more of this.

Well, I’m not likely to have that pleasure. It’s beginning to look like the only lasting result of the sorry decline of liberalism from an assortment of ideas (albeit mostly bad ideas, IMHO) into a white-hot ball of complaint, anger and idiocy will be to cement its position in the seats of power. Liberals once worried about the fact that the ideas weren’t working out as well as hoped (anybody up for a game of Socialism?). Now they’ve just brushed aside any qualms and taken to putting the most effort into thwarting conservatism, especially the dreaded religious kind.

It all happened pretty fast, didn’t it? My first blog entry was to predict in August ‘04 that Bush would win the White House by a wide margin. Blog entries after the election were focused on trying to figure out how liberals would handle the upset.

Again, turns out I’m the one who’s silly. They didn’t make any course correction at all. They just waited for enough people to become confused and out-of-sorts. Now that they are, they only have to keep them that way, and all will be well. Pretty bad state for the union to be in, really.