STATE OF THE UNION: I didn’t watch the State of the Union speech, although I suppose I should have—it’s part of my civic obligation as an American citizen, after all, just like jury duty or betting on the Lotto and so doing my part to educate the uneducable little wretches that daily infest school buildings from one end of this our Great Republic to the other—but if I want to watch someone spout non sequiturs I’ll watch Chico Marx; he’s funnier than the former junior senator from Illinois and his non sequiturs don’t cost as much. The real reason I didn’t watch the State of the Union, however, is that Miss Nancy is no longer the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Mr. Boehner may be a very emotional guy with tear ducts that could sink the Titanic in twenty minutes and the Andrea Doria in half an hour, but he’s not going to jump to his feet every ten seconds the way Miss Nancy did. Watching Miss Nancy doing her imitation of a Jack LaLanne in the Box was always the highlight of the State of the Union speech, because when she leapt up to applaud the former senator’s vapid blatherings, and she would leap up at the drop of a semicolon, all the other Democrats in the chamber had to get to their feet as well, and watching some of those guys trying to get to their feet was morbidly fascinating, in much the same way as waiting for cars to crash at the Daytona 500 is morbidly fascinating.

And no Democratic member of the House could refuse to get up or even hand in a letter from their mother saying they couldn’t stand up because the family doctor said so; no, indeed, Miss Nancy stood watching the members with her chemically enhanced Gorgon glare for any sign of weakness, compromise, second thoughts or, horrors of horrors, moderation and bipartisanship. There would be none of that in Miss Nancy’s House, no sirreee, not if some old-timer wanted to keep his committee chairmanship and thus his personal fiefdom over some small portion of the federal bureaucracy. So the Democratic bulls got up every time Miss Nancy did, whether they wanted to or not, and the viewer at home sat and watched and maybe even took bets on whether or not some of these guys would keel over from all the unexpected exercise or, pushed to the edge at last, join the Republicans in order to stay in their seats.

Of course, had these Democrats crossed the aisle and joined the Republicans they would still have seats to stay in, and now that they are gone and Miss Nancy isn’t Speaker anymore she can use all her newly acquired spare time to step in and take over the late Jack LaLanne’s role as America’s dean of exercise gurus. I’d bet someone as enthusiastic as she is could sell a lot of Jack LaLanne’s juicers on the cable channels; maybe she can even get everyone in this our Great Republic a juicer as part of the former junior senator’s health care reform, that and a DVD giving the recipient instructions on the proper way to do a jumping jack. I know that I wouldn’t mind getting a free juicer at taxpayer’s expense, except that I am one of those taxpayers and I don’t want a juicer and I really don’t want to do jumping jacks. I’m not really a big juice person; juice usually doesn’t have caffeine in it and I more or less insist on there being caffeine in what I drink. And bubbles; I like carbonation a lot too.