I haven’t read any blogs this morning, so I wouldn’t be surprised if plenty of other people have already used the above title to describe George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address last night. You don’t have to be a Democrat to realize how strangely empty and disjointed this speech truly was: twenty minutes of abstract uplift; another twenty minutes or so restating his 2004 Fear Offensive on national security and using it to justify everything he’s doing in Iraq and at home; and then a fifteen-minute drive-by on everything else. I have no clue why the White House spent so much time over the last couple of weeks, and especially yesterday, signalling that Bush would do some heavy lifting on health care and energy. The former got one completely unoriginal graph; and the latter, which could have been lifted directly from a very brief summary of a 2004 John Kerry speech on energy independence, was a joke when you look at the administration’s actual energy policies.Corruption? An “everybody does it” sentence that seemed to suggest Bush was still a newcomer to Washington who’s not responsible for anything that happens there (oh yeah, there was that other sentence where Bush lumped together influence-peddlers and “activist judges”). Katrina? Just a spending number. The economy? Everything’s coming up roses, so long as Bush can keep “isolationists” at bay. Like a lot of people, I was wrong in anticipating the content of this speech. I figured it would be a vast exercise in damage control on all those issues the admininstration and the GOP has either screwed up or ignored. But the White House has apparently decided not to bother with anything beyond the barest kind of lip service to any topic other than national security, in the belief that this one issue trumps everything else combined. At an early morning breakfast meeting today, I heard Gov. Tom Vilsack compare Bush to a football coach who is so convinced the opposition is incapable of stopping a particular play that he’s arrogantly announcing it in advance. That play, which is sort of the Single Wing of latter-day GOP politics, is “terrorism” right up the gut. And so it should be abundantly clear to Democrats looking forward to the midterm elections that this is the play the Republicans are going to run, until we learn how to stop it.