Posted 7:23 PM by Gene

The State of the Union Message has long been a theatrical fake. The President enters the House chamber to the kind of hearty huzzah only uttered by a roomful of politicians with knives behind their backs. The Cabinet minus the usual nonentity for safety's sake (a joke that isn't as funny as it used to be) offers polite applause, either because its members are in the loop and have heard things discussed to death or are out of the loop and thinking of quitting. The Supreme Court docilely applauds, then sits. From behind the too-obvious TelePrompTer the President issues twenty thoroughgoing applause-line bromides written by someone else and greeted with a kind of rolling standing O that resembles "the wave" because members of the opposition don't want to be too opposing. The President salutes a pre-planted victim in the peanut gallery -- over here, Mr. President -- and the whole peanut gallery stands. After what is now ninety minutes of mind-numbing speechifying the President leaves and even the stalwarts of his own party can't work up an cheer through the whole recessional as their behinds are numb too for all the standing Os. Really, as Andrew Ferguson notes, the speech would be better done as a report -- especially so now, when we might war with Iraq, and the president could offer compelling evidence for war in, say, a classified appendix -- and all the busybodies and interns and clerks who do DC's real work could get to write on all the things the President doesn't know about. Ah, but we must have our useless theater.