Sitting in the Dark

I was all set to watch President Bush's speech last night, but a few minutes into it, the lights blinked, I heard a loud bang outside, and then the lights went out. It turns out that a power line had broken down at the end of my street and my entire block was without power.

With nothing else to do and it being dark outside, I went to bed. (By the way, taking out contact lenses by the light of a flashlight is an interesting experience.) I woke up when the power was restored sometime after eleven and stumbled around resetting the clocks and making sure my computer, which I had unplugged from the power source, was hooked up again.

So I missed the speech and the punditocracy holding forth. (I also missed an episode of Entourage on HBO. Damn.) But from what I read in the papers, the president said nothing new, he didn't offer any new strategies or reasons for going to war, and he invoked 9/11 six times. No surprises.

What mystifies me is why he did the speech in the first place. Usually a president will use the opportunity to speak to the nation to advance some new agenda item, announce a shift in policy, or reassure the nation after a major event. But from what I gather, none of those things occurred last night. Catching clips and reading the transcript, there's no news there; nothing we haven't heard before except now the desperate tie-in with 9/11, which, in the case of Iraq, would be like Franklin Roosevelt demanding that the United States invade Italy in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor; after all, Italy had a brutal dictator, it had invaded helpless countries, and had a powerful alliance with strongly anti-democratic countries. But it had nothing to do with the attack and it would have been nothing more than a bloody and fruitless diversion to invade and conquer Rome when the true enemy was somewhere else.

So I guess I didn't miss a whole lot last night, sitting there in the dark. I probably got as much out of the speech as anyone else did who actually got to see it.