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- Of all the criticisms of the SOTU, the most irritating is the charge that the president didn't express sufficient solidarity with protesters in Egypt or any number of a bazillion other places around the world. For one thing, as Daniel Larison says, this wasn't a "State of the Empire speech." Yet across the board, from the left, from the "reasonable center," from the right wing, there's a call for moral clarity in the presidency, which is bizarrely detached from actual policy outcomes. At what point does solidarity become policy?
- Rand Paul's proposed $500 billion cut to the federal budget this year clearly will get nowhere fast. But it is an interesting look at the fantasy world he would like to create, and believes is politically possible. (Or else, why would he introduce it?) A $100 billion cut to the military? Has he ever talked to his Republican colleagues? Eliminating entire departments that undergird the welfare state? Does he understand there are constituencies in politics?
- Shani O. Hilton watches dreadful interviews with Condoeeza Rice and Hillary Clinton in which the interviewers obsess over things like "Do you dream of a fairytale wedding?" (to Rice) and whether "she's hoping for grandchildren now that daughter Chelsea is married" (to Clinton). These women are the current and previous secretaries of state, a rather prestigious position, and they're being subjected to lines of questioning that a man never would be simply because, in Hilton's words, "they have female reproductive organs."
- Remainders: Past examples of "winning the future"; this spring, we will no longer be able to determine our terrorism threat level by simply glancing at a color-coded chart; I think Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) has watched the 1985 Chuck Norris vehicle Invasion U.S.A. one too many times; and are lucrative Fox News contracts responsible for the 2012 field's reluctance to announce their candidacies?
--Mori Dinauer
