So does anyone else notice a lot of “sh” sounds creeping into Bush’s speech in odd places, like “Korean Peninshula?” I keep expecting him to to bust into a full-blown Sean Connery-as-Bond imitation and holler “Sho, Shaddam, I she you’ve been shtockpiling sharin gas! It won’t shtand!”

Anyway, if you’re tuning in around 9:40, you’ve already heard all the good stuff. According to the copy of the SotU the White House sends out about 10 minutes before Dubya reads it off the teleprompter, he just bitches about Iraq after unveiling his new Project BioShield and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. Now, despite the Hussein fetish, and Bush’s absurd Rambo rhetoric about having “otherwise dealt with” the terrorist leaders (or suspected terrorist leaders) they didn’t arrest, this actually wasn’t so bad. Lots of stuff on tax cuts, a bone thrown to Social Security privatizers, and all in all, only 20 new proposals (or urgings to pass stuff still hanging). Compare Clinton’s 104 in 2000! This shows the mixed blessings of having a halfwit lead your country: unlike Clinton, he is not under the delusion that he has scores of great new ideas that should be passed into law Real Soon Now. The downside is that the few ideas he does have include things like “invade small Muslim country that poses no serious threat.”

I’m not down with the cloning ban, the anti-abortion junk, or the “faith based” charity, also known as government subsidy for missionary work with free soup thrown in. Still, all in all, it could’ve been a hell of a lot worse. Let’s just hope his extended sabre-rattling is only a bit more bluster geared to scare Iraq into better compliance with inspections.

Update: Will has a better, less reflexively snarky take. Also, Atrios links the photo below — amusing in itself — and a commenter points out that if you cover the right side of his face, and then the left… well, try it yourself.