Not the state of the union, but a reasonable fascimile thereof
One thing I forgot to post about last month. Debb and I watch The Daily Show pretty regularly. We just got cable a few weeks ago, so until then I’d download torrents of the shows at the end of every week. Worked fine, but we’d be behind the current shows by a week or two. So around January 21, we were watching the previous week’s show, and Stewart was talking about Bush saying something to some reporters, blah blah. And I had a sudden burst of happiness and exclaimed (yeah, I actually exclaimed): “He’s not our president anymore!”
Oh geez, I remember what it was, too. It was the press conference where reporters were asking if he’d made any mistakes, how he felt about things that went wrong, et cetera. And he did that “well I could just sit around and whine about it, wah wah why did this happen to me,” something something. I have to see if that video exists online. I mean really goddamn if that’s not a guy who deserves to take a shoe in the face.
I was reminded of this by Obama’s speech last night. I didn’t watch the speech, but it was on TV, and I walked past it in the middle of it. It’s the first time I’d seen Obama giving a speech in front of Congress, and it was the typical camera shot I’ve seen plenty of times before: president in front, vice president on left, House speaker on right. But…well, as I’ve said before, Bush’s long-running hot streak of suck is what caused my interest in politics, so really for as long as I’ve been paying attention, it’s always been Bush and Cheney up there.
This time it wasn’t. I had another rush of happiness at the image, but it wasn’t Obama that really grabbed my attention — I guess I’m jaded by his speechifying already. What actually got me was Biden. I exclaimed, again: “It is so good to see Biden there!” God, all those years of seeing Cheney’s scowl hovering in the darkness, mentally filling in the thought bubble of the little old ladies he’d rather be evicting or the damsels he’d rather be tying to train tracks, and now finally it’s Joe from Delaware sitting back there, just being a guy. Ahhh.
Speaking of the non-state-of-the-union, I heard Jindal really majorly sucked in his Republican response. I didn’t watch that either, but here’s a post on C&L with two reactions: one from MSNBC people, one from FOX people. They both thought Jindal did badly, but I was amused that MSNBC people said real things about the substance of his speech, and all the FOX people talked about was his delivery. It’s like they could’ve taken two minutes to agree with each other about how terribly the Republicans have failed in picking his striped tie.
Edit: found that video that I mentioned above. The specific part is 7:46 into an 8:36 clip, but it’s a pretty good look at someone who needs to spend more time looking at the dirt side of a Nike. And by “more time” I mean, the 1/4 second it takes it to traverse a 30-foot-long press room by air.
