The [pause] State of the [pause] Union

I don't like to listen to President Bush speak. He pauses too long and too often, and mispronounces words important to his rhetoric, like "nucular," in 4th grade style. I particularly don't like to watch him speak, so this year I was going to skip the State of the Union and just read it, at a brisker pace and with the kind of oratory I imagine Queen Elizabeth spoke to The Troops at Tilbury. But I was too curious, so I chose NPR, whose coverage was punctuated only by the oily voice of Daniel Shore's commentary, and Lynn Neery - the reporter of just who was giving the ovation.

I am a W apologist - a Republican among friendly but strong anti-war Democrats - despite my discomfort with a political state that has America being led by the eponymous son of a not-so-dynamic leader. Add to this the election debacle, and I can sometimes find little else than patriotism in his defense. I have always had great faith in his cabinet and staff choices (Ari Fleischer excluded, but then I think I'd be unsatisfied with anyone but C.J. Cregg), but I have up to this point imagined them advising the, well, dumb president, or at least a leader severely lacking gravitas.

But this year, in spite of the annual speech being, as Abby put it, "boring and full of propaganda," I found myself sometimes choked up, sometimes perplexed, but altogether captivated for the last 20 minutes when he (albeit dramatically) listed Saddam's crimes against the world. It wasn't so much what he said, because I know about speechwriters and the necessity of rhetoric, but the way in which he asserted his leadership, and convinced me that he is not, in fact, dumb. To assume so is a shameful judgment that some of my favorite Biblical mythology decries: In Exodus 4, Moses tells the Lord "I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." This was true, and the Lord provided Moses some encouragement and then a spokesman in the form of the well-spoken Aaron. But it didn't change His implicit faith in Moses's ability to get the job done.

I don't pretend that comparing President Bush to Moses isn't a stretch on many levels, but there's an important personal lesson for me within that comparison. I want to give the President more credit, and though I am saddened and worried by the prospect of war, today I have more faith in this man's ability to make that decision.

I try to imagine intelligence meetings that occured before September 11th - what did those agents know but fear to act upon? What did they present to the people who make those decisions, and how did they determine not to do something? I'm not interested in blame or rehashing what could have been, but I do wonder if we can expect our leaders to be any less vigilant than they are. I hear this phrase: "A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all" shrouded in the burden they carry.

Surely America's motivations aren't altruistic at every level of this imminent war; surely we sometimes posture to the rest of the world. But when the President says "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity," I am, at least for now, a believer.

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I'm Watching: Alias, of course. Why aren't you?

I'm Reading: On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, by Kaye Gibbons. It's okay, but, bless her heart, she wants so badly to be Faulkner.

Mad props to Jessica for ideas.