State of the Union Address

Did you watch the State of the Union Address?

Here are a few quick takes:

-- I think the seating arrangement silliness, in which many congresspeople sat with a colleague from the other side of the aisle, was a plot cooked up by the Republicans to deny President Obama any of the raucous applause lines that he would normally get from a unified, foot-stomping Democratic caucus.

-- I thought the oddest pairings were New York's Anthony Weiner (D-Sarcastic, Angry, Bullshit-calling Realist) sitting with Long Island's Peter King (R-Paranoid, Lying Muslim-hater); Washington's pixie Patty Murray (D-Person on O'Reilly's Hit List) seated with South Dakota's John Thune (R-I Look Like a High School Quarterback So I Should Get to Be President One Day); and Massachusetts' John Kerry (D-Actual War Hero) with Arizona's John McCain (R- Crashed Three Military Aircraft and Got Captured by the Enemy).

-- I thought the speech was rather flat, perhaps because of the seating arrangement issue (see above), but I didn't get much of the soaring rhetoric we've come to expect from Obama.

-- Can we just stop with the "bold predictions" and the "bold challenges" already? It seems every president feels compelled to issue such statements in the SotU, and Obama was no exception: ..."by 2035, 80% of America's electricity will come from clean energy sources..." ..."become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015..." "...[give] 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years..." "...within the next five years, we'll...deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98% of all Americans." Enough already. Remember when George W. Bush proposed "putting a man on Mars by 2037."? I do believe that was the apex nadir of ridiculous State of the Union promises.

--The President should have done a better job of personally introducing each of the people invited to sit with the First Lady (as opposed to just telling their stories and letting the cameras find them). I'm thinking in particular of the family of Christina Taylor Green, but also the three decorated young war heroes he alluded to in the speech but never mentioned by name.

--Bid you notice John Boehner actually cried again?!? It came when Obama mentioned the he (Boehner) had mopped the floor of his father's bar as a child.

-- It is abundantly clear, Speaker of the House John Boehner is a darker hue than the President of the United States.