Beware the Jabberwock

[Geee]

American Spectator:

There will be no more talk of unhelpful Republicans sipping slurpees as the president and his progressive friends work up a good, honest sweat trying to haul the automotive equivalent of the ship of state out of the nearest ditch. There will be no more mention of the "millions of jobs" that were supposedly "created or saved" by the trillion dollar DOA "stimulus" program. There will be less pie-in-the-sky posturing about the enormous potential of green technologies. Mostly happily of all, there will be no Nancy Pelosi as House speaker. We won't see her constantly popping up and down in the upper right-hand corner of our television screens -- a deranged jack-in-the-box, screaming her approval every time the president pauses for an applause line.

All that is to the good. Nevertheless, I, for one, am groaning at the thought of tonight's state-of-the-union address. Do we really want another exercise in presidential rhetoric, self-aggrandizement, and detachment from what remains of a functioning real world?

When he ascends the podium this evening, Barack Obama, in his Pan-like manipulation of different guises, will be at pains to show off his new business-friendly persona and bona fides. For a president who spent a large part of his first two years in office denouncing "fat cat bankers," greedy businessmen, and the profit motive, this will be the beginning of a calculated flirtation with free-market capitalism. To borrow John Ehrlichman's phrase from the Nixon and Watergate era, he is seeking "a modified, limited hangout" with free-market capitalism in the run-up to the 2012 general election.