Just staying alive takes all one's focus

Iraqis are 'indifferent' to Bush's SOTU speech. After all, they've been listening to the promises for three explosive years and it's only gotten worse:

In Baghdad, Hoda Abdel Hamid, Al Jazeera's Iraq correspondent, said Iraqis had so many problems that they would not pay much attention to Bush's speech.

"Iraqis told me 'we don't believe in all his promises - he's going to ask us to be patient, but he's not the one living under the bombs'". "All Iraqis can hear this morning is explosions - there are mortars going off and there is a heavy gun battle going on just a couple of hundred metres away.

"This is what Iraqis are listening to."

Senator Jim Webb

does us proud.

Transcript here, and here is part:

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues - those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death - we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way.

We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us - sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable - and predicted - disarray that has followed.

The war's costs to our nation have been staggering.
Financially.
The damage to our reputation around the world.
The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism.
And especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped forward to serve.

Update 1/24: Think Progress offers a point by point challenge to Bush's SOTU.

The only one believing the promises in the SOTU

Fluffy is stunned by the promises of eternal kibble in her bowl....