Black Box Report

The president's annual state of the union address has long been, at least since the invention of television*, a piece of political theater (*SOTU trivia: The first president to give the SOTU on tv was the oft-compared-to-Bush Harry Truman). And George W. Bush's farewell performance last night had it all, from comedic tragedy...:

Bush actually said…:

"We will insure that decisions about your medical care are made in the privacy of your doctor's office, not in the halls of Congress. "

I'll respond with four words: Terri Schiavo, Jane Roe.

...to tragic comedy:

Nothing was a bigger tell of the desperation here than the heroic centerpiece of Bush's address. It's pretty safe to say that before the Bush administration, most Americans had no idea what an earmark was. But Bush, the earmark president, the man who presided over and enabled the Republican Congress during the Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham scandals, changed that. And now he's decided that he's really going to bring the hammer down on the practice now that the Republicans no longer run Congress (actually not so much bring the hammer down as threaten to bring the hammer down right before he leaves office).

And what's good theater without suspension of disbelief and creating your own reality?

"There has not been another attack on our soil since 9/11"

-- Anthrax! Anthrax! Oh well. For some reason that whole episode has been officially erased from the historical record or something.

Individually, Bush's performance last night is unlikely to win any awards. But the production values were so luscious, the script so filled with reliable crowd-pleasers, it hardly mattered. It was a D.C. masterpiece that will go down in history for the way it took American political theater into a new whole new genre:

This Washington revival does ample justice to the definition of Theater of the Absurd as "broad comedy, often similar to Vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism."

Or to paraphrase,