United We Rant

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

My fellow Americans, the state of the union is angry. Also strong. Presidents usually say the state of the union is strong. But this year you would have to go with strongly angry.

In his speech on Wednesday night, President Obama actually dropped that traditional state-of-the-union-is rhetoric completely in honor of the new irascibility. “We all hated the bank bailout,” he said in one of his first big applause lines.

Yes, the one good thing you can say about our highest elected officials is that they are ticked off at so many people that sooner or later they’ve got to climb up on some common ground. The House hates the Senate. The liberal Democrats hate the moderate Democrats. The normal conservative Republicans hate the hyper Tea Party-types. The Tea Party-ists are having so many internal fights that there’s a definite danger of broken crockery.

And, of course, everybody hates the bankers, except the Republicans who sat on their hands when the president called for taxing them.

(More here.)