If you missed it, you arguably owe it to yourself (if not the rest of us) to at least skim last night’sState of the Union address. I watched the damned thing and still found myself saying, “What? He didn’t do this part on TV, did he? Where the hell was I when he started talking about baseball steroids?”

I think that particular passage was a microcosm of the speech as a whole: completely random, and drugs were involved. 2002 was much better. 2003 obviously wasn’t, since I don’t remember a thing about it now.

It wasn’t as campaign-y as I expected, though I chuckled warmly when he casually reminded me about Thanksgiving in Baghdad and the flight suit. He summed the year up fairly well, advocated his positions fairly articulately if not persuasively, and stuck to his guns on Scary, Dangerous Iraq in a way that won points for both consistency and pant-pissing hilarity.

For sheer comic brilliance, however, nothing topped when he direly warned, “key provisions of the Patriot Act expire next year” and half the room burst into spontaneous applause, leaving the president to wait with an expression that can best be described as “You sons of bitches…!” That and Ted Kennedy watching the whole thing like he swallowed some bad ham. All in all, I thought it gave me plenty to gnaw on as we head to the polls this year.

Not that it will matterin the end.