When George Bush gives a speech it recalls that moment at the end of Orwell's Animal Farm when the animals are startled by an unfamiliar sight: "It was a pig walking on his hind legs." It is possible but wholly unnatural to the animal.

And the presentation of the President to the assembled Congress is also foreshadowed in that worthy book—

And finally there was a tremendous baying of dogs and a shrill crowing from the black cockerel, and out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him.

Unfortunately I had a date at the Pink Snapper and missed the whole affair. It is just as well because I would've worn my "Simply Appalling" T-shirt and been yanked out by the ear.

Howard Kurtz, media critic for the Washington Post, surveyed the gamut of pundit opinion "from A to B" on the State of the Union address and found the speech so boring that neither Right nor Left could find anything interesting to say about it. Perhaps John Podhoretz of the New York Post, a sheeplike cheerleader and absolutely frothing right-winger, came the closest—

George W. Bush gave the least consequential major speech of his presidency — and it was a brilliant political stroke.