(np) best thing I've seen yet on SotU

[Michael Bailey]

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/opinion/reaction-to-state-of-the-union-2010-012810


It's a wonder he didn't laugh out loud.


Looking out over the frauds and lightweights and bland hunks of
man-cheese that make up the assembled political establishment, and
beyond them to a spavined and impotent political culture that would
embarrass any self-respecting monkey house, and beyond that to a
country willing to abandon almost anything it once deemed important to
the first huckster who turns up weeping on cable television, Barack
Obama must have been sorely tempted to let out one final, mighty
guffaw and close his first State of the Union address with the words,
"And I am the only president of the United States in this room,
motherfuckers," after which he would return to the White House and eat
Mitch McConnell's gonads on toast.

But, of course, he didn't do that. There were the usual sonorous
banalities about how everyone in Washington should work together, and
about how great the American people are. There was something in the
address to piss off just about everyone. He came out for more nuclear
plants, for the marketing mirage that is "clean" coal, and, if not for
"Drill, baby drill," then for "Drill a little bit there, baby." He
talked about tax cuts until hell wouldn't have them. "Thought I might
get a little applause there," he said, grinning down at the wax museum
that is the Republican congressional leadership.

At the same time, he stuck the Republicans in a box over why they
can't go along with a fee to get back the rest of the public money
that the government shoveled into the banks so that Tim Geithner
wouldn't be hanging from a lamppost in lower Manhattan. The lumpy
Caucasians of American "conservatism" sat there motionless, freezing
themselves into the opening frames of every campaign commercial that
will be run on behalf of a Democrat come fall — if the Democrats are
smart, which is always a long shot.

He had a whole truckload of ideas on making college more affordable.
He talked tough on regulatory reform. He even mocked the Republicans
on the spending freeze that was so unpopular with Obama's own base.
When some hay-shaker snickered about the fact that the freeze doesn't
start until 2011, he pointed out, "That is the way budgeting is done."
And get that weak-ass shit out of my house.

And he did something I never thought he'd get around to doing. In his
own unique way — which is to say elliptically and gently and with
maddening equanimity — he made it quite plain on several occasions
exactly who was responsible for the big, steaming bags of awful that
were waiting on his desk when he took office a year ago. For all the
pundits who were advising him to be more like the Blessed Ronnie
Reagan, this was the most Reaganesque moment any president has had
since ole Dutch shuffled off. In his first State of the Union, and for
nearly three years after that, Reagan never missed an opportunity to
hang anything that went wrong on Jimmy Carter. (No names, of course.
This is Washington and that simply is not done.) Every time Obama
referenced "the last administration" or "the lost decade," and,
especially at that moment when, while discussing Republican economic
policy, he explained, "That's what we did for eight years," I suspect
the wind blew cold through the uncut brush of a now abandoned toy
ranch in Crawford.

There was a weight to him last night that wasn't there during the
campaign, as though he's spent a year in the job and realized quite
recently how goddamn hard it is to work with cowards and morons to get
anything whatsoever done, and that he realized even more recently that
he really might be up to the job. All that serene confidence on the
campaign trail always struck me as affectation, as armor against a job
he was chasing that seemed to grow more miserable by the moment. No
sane person should have wanted to be president that much in 2008. If
he was having trouble finding his feet, it was because the presidency
was more of a morass than it ever was.

Last night, though, he had to know. You don't do what he did unless
you know — calling out not only the political opposition for its
opportunistic nihilism, and not only the United States Senate for its
structural inertia and for the remarkable number of venal gobshites
among its membership, but the Supreme Goddamn Court of the United
States, sitting right there in front of him, for handing down a recent
decision that guarantees that every election for the foreseeable
future will have all the essential integrity and nobility of a
Moroccan bazaar. You don't do that, getting Justice Sam Alito mumbling
under his breath like a drunk on a subway, unless you know you're the
only president in the room.

Who else is there? The Democrats are a timorous collection of trimmers
and hedgers, one more bad beat away from whimpering themselves into a
gelatinous goo just liquid enough to ooze under the door of some
lobbying shop. They couldn't get laid in a whorehouse if they drove up
in a Brink's truck. They spent a flat year trying to get one vote out
of Olympia Snowe.

And the Republicans are simply insane. Poor old John McCain is being
primaried by J.D. Hayworth, once the dumbest man in Congress, at the
behest of what might be called the lunatic fringe, if it wasn't the
very mainstream of the party now. The energy of the party is wholly
directed from the ancient, dark heart of American conspiracy theories,
where it is not directed at simply standing athwart anything this
president wants to do. Republicans repeatedly have voted against
measures they have previously supported. Meanwhile, angry seniors in
goofy hats have got them all terrified. Even Sarah Palin, as empty a
vessel as ever was, is being eclipsed by Scott Brown, the recently
elected senator from Massachusetts, who ran a campaign in which he was
identified as a Republican about as often as he was identified as a
Gaboon viper. The grumpy grampas loved him.

And the political culture is no better. Sally Quinn, the aging doyenne
at the Washington Post, wrote a column shortly before the speech in
which the Obama administration was chided for not going to all the
right parties, and did so in a tone so arch it would have sent Marie
Antoinette up the walls of the Bastille herself. The hottest book at
the moment is Game Change, which is what de Tocqueville would have
written, if he'd been a sniggering seventh-grade gossip, and which
spends endless pages leering at the bloody wreckage of the marriage of
John and Elizabeth Edwards while mentioning Afghanistan twice. Being
president at this sodden, moldering time in history requires a
considerable immunity against infectious bullshit.

Barack Obama has been at this for a year. We've all watched as the
noble speeches congealed into doughy inaction too often already. He
has stumbled and he has bungled, and he's probably going to see a lot
of his margin for error erased in the midterm elections in November.
He still overrates the American people as a political commonwealth,
and he remains resolutely determined to seek out the good in a
political opposition that wants his head on a plate. But, last night,
it became clear that he'd better know what he's doing, for all our
sakes, because last night, he was the baddest ass on the block, and
the only president in the hall.





-- 
-- "Nonetheless.  Nonetheless.  None.  The.  Less!" - Loudon Trott to
Nicky Finn (in "Who's That Girl")