State of the Union...Yawn!

WITH ONLY ONE hour to go until the SOTU, this political junkie has to admit that I'm probably going to pass on the speech tonight. Oh, the TV will be on at 9:00pm and it will be tuned to NBC, but I'm not going to sit down a focus like I did last night during '24'. The State of the Union has become too predicatalbe (thanks bloggers!), too boring (thanks Presidential advisors!), and too damn long (thanks clap-happy members of Congress!). It's unwatchable. I'll watch the post-game show for a few minutes tonight, check the internet a bit before I go to bed, skim over the transcript in tomorrow's Post and be done with it.

SOTU has more hype than the Super Bowl (though, mecifully, it only lasts a day or two instead of 2 weeks). For goodness sake, most of what the president will say tonight has already been poll-tested and previewed in the media, giving partisans on both sides the chance to frame the debate before Bush utters a single word. The President is making a speech tonight where he will:

1. highlight the things he believes have gone well in the past year
2. criticize those who criticize him.

It's the same speech presidents have been making since the Reagan era.

No, I'm going to skip this one and catch the highlights in the morning.

With any luck, ESPN2 will be showing poker at 9:00.

Poker. Now that's good television.