Bush’s State of the Union is tonight. So what?

Bush’s (thankfully last) State of the Union is on tonight at 9 pm Eastern time. You can probably watch it live on every single channel your television gets. It might even be dubbed into Spanish on one or two of those channels. Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of the state of Kansas, will be delivering the response for the Democrats. But my reaction, I’m afraid, is similar to my reaction to the bit of news about WMDs in my last post: So what? Who cares?

Throughout the political sphere, and more significantly on both sides of the aisle, nobody seems to care. Hillary Clinton is treating this non-event with downright disdain, though Fox News did attempt to spin her reaction into the headline ‘Hillary Excited About Bush’s State of the Union’. Tony Blankley, on last weekend’s Left, Right, and Center, noted that this is the first time in recent memory that the press hasn’t even really mentioned the speech in the week beforehand. John McCain will skip the speech entirely to campaign in Florida.

Bush’s opportunity to create a legacy for himself is over, both on the international and on the domestic fronts. The most he can do is to create the appearance that he did something about the economy before it becomes someone else’s problem in a year’s time. No action will be proposed or taken on Iraq, besides the vague and fuzzy feeling he’ll try to project, for the nth time, that things are going well. On the economy, Bush will propose some vague and ill-defined action, thus giving people—especially the Democratic candidates—a chance to continue last week’s competition in comparing the relative sizes of their stimulus packages. Generally, the speech will suck—and if Bush’s handlers have any brains left about them, it’ll be short.

Oh well. If your State of the Union parties need some spicing up—which they no doubt will—this year’s drinking game looks pretty good.