It’s not that I’m surprised our Commander In Chief spent most of the State of the Union talking about taxes and inflicting upon his audience that repulsive little smirk as applause greeted the end of his every sentence. I wouldn’t call it surprise, either, that I experienced when he tried to pass himself off as an environmentalist (not to mention an AIDS activist). And I wasn’t even a little surprised when he trotted out his favorite weapons of mass destruction routine. Apart from a couple of references to the evils of “hitlerism” and an impressively concerted effort by his speechwriter to see how many times it’s humanly possible to work the word “terror” into any given sentence, we didn’t learn anything new. Even given that this is a Bush we’re talking about here, I can’t recall the last time I sat through a more useless and tiresome speech, and I’ve listened to the State of the Union every year since before I really had an inkling what the Union was, much less an interest in its State. My family has always been perhaps more than usually political (while it is a much-lamented fact that I was born on the day Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, I was handing out campaign literature for Dukakis by 1988), and while I wouldn’t by any means call myself an enthusiastic Democrat, I identify particularly with my father, who (as my brother recounted earlier) was driven to forcibly remove a cover featuring our President from an issue of the Economist, and to do savage violence upon it.