As this post more or less coincides with President Obama’s first State of the Union Address delivered last night, I guess I should give at least give an idea of what I thought of the speech.

It’s this: Nice speech, fat lot of good it will do.

Obama does give good speech. What worries me is that I also have every reason to believe Civil War general and military paperweight George McClellan was a better public speaker than the much less charismatic but far more kick-ass Ulysses S. Grant. See, the people back then who needed to be pounded into submission so that what’s right could flourish, the  ass-backwards slave-owning secessionists, not only wouldn’t have cared who could talk better, they would have encouraged doing nothing but talk. Grant could have been mute and scratching “charge” on a slate hung around his neck — as he did later in life — for all giving speeches mattered.

For all the wingnutty talk of taking up arms every time things don’t go their way, it’s appalling that Democrats still can’t bring themselves to put up a good legislative scuffle over things that really, really matter.  Like health care, like Iraq, like other things in which people dying allow for a little in-congress rudeness. The few Democrats that consistently do fight, such as Alan Grayson and Al Franken, should not just be copied, they should be cloned. You’d think that after Joe Lieberman screwed them five or six times, cracking a grin with a mouth like a sheep’s labia, Democrats as a whole would get the hint.