Thanks to the vicissitudes of work (proposals FTMFW, and I’m taking a break so don’t judge, if you please), I was officially unable to watch tonight’s State of the Union address, as opposed to unofficially not bothering. Dim memory suggests that I must have watched a few over the years, but the only one that I can clearly remember is the one in which Bill Clinton used the phrase “pap smear test.” Not because I saw it, but because several friends who happen to be ladies spent the next several days saying “I can’t believe I just heard the President of the US say ‘pap smear’ on television during the State of the Union address!”
It would appear that folks whom I follow on Twitter weren’t overwhelmed, but I can’t say that I share in any disappointment… addressing government spending is boring, detail-oriented, sets the diffuse collective good against narrow incentives to spend, and if actually implemented would result in the immediate turnover of all branches of government when commie sympathizers liberals and echt volk conservatives discovered how much of their well being is directly and indirectly the result of public spending.
There’s no possible way to make a speech to get people to sign up for that. We can’t even get people to cope with gas at $4 a gallon without a collective meltdown. So if the president’s speech was long on happy generalities and short on details about how much our allowance is going to be cut, I can’t blame him. What’s the point?
