Moe Lane

Doing a quick eyeball assessment, and based on the people that Bing had watching the speech…

• Everybody likes the idea of immigration reform.
• Democrats like the idea of “bipartisan tax reform;” everybody else is meh.
• Democrats are meh about the idea of gun control; everybody else is FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.
• And that latter attitude’s coming from the women, too.
• Climate change continues to demonstrate its status as something that we only like to worry about when the economy’s healthy.
• Bringing the troops home remains popular.
• Wow, look at all those women so totally not give a sh*t about the Violence Against Women and Paycheck Fairness Acts!

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe Obama should have just sent a note.  The way that we used to do, before Woodrow Wilson screwed things up for everybody.  Like he was wont to do.

Not much need for analysis on this one, but generally: Marco Rubio’s speech was solid, well thought-out, and aside from that water bobble thing (which he smartly made fun of himself, afterward) on-key.  Rubio is good at this sort of thing, which is one major reason why the grassroots went with him early in 2010.  As for Rand Paul… I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the man is a sarcastic so-and-so.  Which was, in its way, a great response to Barack Obama’s opinions, which are far too often quite profoundly silly.

I’m sure that people are going to try to mock the Rubio water thing, but I wouldn’t sweat it too much.  God knows that it’s not like Obama’s rhetorical gifts are going to overshadow it, based on THIS SotU address.  That was… boring.  Horribly, horribly boring.  Even by Obama standards.

And I’m defining ‘colleagues’ to include ‘the rough equivalents to me on the opposite side*;’ I think that few of us really want to watch the speech, but we all feel that we sort of have to. Because… civics, I guess. But, seriously: there’s something kind of broken about the fact that the most interesting thing that’s happened at a SotU in the last decade was Joe Wilson (accurately, by the way) calling Barack Obama a liar.

Bored now.

Moe Lane

*Which don’t really exist; everybody on the Left-sphere who plays at RedState.com’s level is more or less told what to write, and everybody who has my level of independence is lucky if they get MoeLane.com’s amount of traffic. It’d be tragic, except that I don’t actually give a flying [expletive deleted].

Now, this is rich:

Here’s what we know about President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night: It will include some news — as in new challenges aimed at Congress — and enough rhetoric about economic growth and job creation to sound familiar to most Americans who worry about continued 8 percent unemployment.

The president’s speech, described by White House officials as an expansion of January’s inauguration theme of “opportunity for all,” will kick off a week of campaign-style Obama travel designed to pressure GOP lawmakers to bend to the wishes of [WHAT THE DEMOCRATS CLAIM IS] a majority of Americans — or risk their election-year wrath.

Yeah, I had to fix that article a bit: I’m a little surprised, though.  Usually Real Clear Politics is admirably even-handed about these sorts of things.  Maybe the author is new? (more…)

Glenn Reynolds, in the aftermath of his one comment on the SotU:

That’s my only SOTU liveblog. We’re going to watch Big Bang Theory. It’s a rerun, but so is this speech.

Well, that’s why he’s at the top of this particular game.

Jim Geraghty thinks so, I think: and certainly the way that my brain snapped last night during the Terry Schiavo question – WHAT THE [EXPLETIVE DELETED], NBC? – and I started chanting invocations to Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth on Twitter would be evidence arguing against even more debates.  And I have a State of the Union address to watch tonight!  Oh, boy!

Seriously, they should never schedule one of these things back-t0-back to a legitimately major speech, ever again.  I feel almost [nauseated] at this point.

I won’t spoil it by showing it: click the link.  Trust me, this isn’t a criticism of the Justice: if I had been there I might have been tempted to do the same thing.  It’s like the President had reached through time and drained the SotU of all interest in order t0 mystically fuel his Tucson speech…

Via Andrew Malcolm.

The question before the board: below is a word picture of the reaction of NPR listeners to Tuesday’s State of the Union address (this can fairly be called a ‘receptive audience’ for a Democratic President).  They were asked to describe the speech in three words: the larger the word in the picture, the more it was used – which presumably means the biggest word is one that can be reasonably be seen as the word that people will tend to most associate with the speech.

The word of the day was apparently ‘salmon’:

(H/T: @jeffemmanuel)

So here goes: Did President Obama intend for his speech Tuesday night to be about salmon? – Serious question: the President has a definite problem with generating memorable bits on his own for his prepared speeches*, and at least this one was a deliberate joke.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Now that the first rush of secular Messianic hysteria has subsided, can we all just admit that President Obama ripped off “Yes we can!” from Bob the Builder?  We’d be better off as a country if we just faced this unfortunate truth head-on, as it were.

…was, overall, not an advantage for the President: it made things dull.

Well. Duller. You kind of need that seating polarization to give you the feedback at how well or poorly the President is doing at the SotU. Mind you, the seating buddy thing also did something really, really cruel to President Obama: it denied him an opportunity to look over the crowd and think to himself Damn, but we got our heads handed to us last year.  That’s something that he really, really needs to remember for the next two years, lest he end up watching the 2014 SotU address from a private residence in Chicago.

Hey, if I thought that he was actually listening to me I’d never be writing this out.  It’s not like the President has me over every Sunday for cakes and tea…

Moe Lane

The most exciting point of the SotU was when my kid dropped and broke a water glass.  Tells you something that I missed thirty minutes from that and story time, and it didn’t make a darn bit of difference, really.

…blah blah:

(pause)

Sorry: it’s just that I’ve just heard that tonight’s SotU is going to be a heck of a lot like last year’s SotU, and the only things of any kind of interest that happened at last year’s SotU were the two reactions to two damfool things that the President said.  Couple that with the fact that Enzio is STILL stuck in that stupid tomb in Assassin’s Creed 2, and the end result is that I am bored, bored, bored.

Not to pile onto the President – yes, it is amazing that I manage to avoid random lightning strikes, isn’t it – but I have a bit of advice to the Second Stage Lensman currently slumming as American chief of state: when your organization has gone through considerable time and trouble to create an email list which attempts to give its members the (illusory) feeling that they are part of a politically activist Gideon’s Band… do not insult said members’ intelligence by implying that they default to being unaware of when the State of the Union address is.

Yes, yes, I know: if the administration thought that the average OfA member was capable of tuning in to watch the President on Tuesday without being reminded of it first, the administration would never have sent out the email in the first place.  But there’s subtle.  And then there’s unsubtle.  And then there’s “As some of you know…”

Sheesh.  A simple “As you know…” and I wouldn’t have been able to do this post.  Real elementary goofball error there, Team Barry.

Moe Lane

PS: No, there’s no semantic content in the rest of the remarks.  Was there supposed to be? – Seriously, I think that it’s unfair to ding the President for that; it’s like dinging the sky for not being plaid.