I’m at the lovely Montlake Ale House (formerly Jilly’s East), where the lower-case-m meetup known as Drinking Liberally has its weekly local gathering. Tonight’s topic A, of course: The State o’ The Union speech.

Several Drinking Liberally attendees with their own blogs are writing now, or have written in the past hour, about the speech via their own individual laptop ‘puters.

My own thoughts on it:

Bush’s content, natch, was the same-old same-old. Bush never admits mistakes, claims to have always been right and to be even right-er now. Stay the course. Keep doing what we’ve been doing, even more aggressively. More tax cuts. More domestic spying. More troops in Iraq. More unfunded interference in the local schools. More attempts to smash Social Security in the name of saving it. More paeans to the oil companies, the drug companies, the HMOs, and the employers of migrant laborers (though not necessarily to those laborers themselves).

It’s the tone that was different. That and the body language. For the first time since before the ’04 debates, Bush seemed like almost a real person. Nonverbally he was neither a noise-machine robot nor a deer in the proverbial headlights. Bush has again become a worthy opponent, someone I won’t feel guilty about as I do my part to send him into early retirement.

The Democratic response, given by Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (who’ll never be mistaken for Charles Foster Kane) was, as many liberal bloggers predicted, a grave disappointment. Kaine came across as a less-polished Alan Colmes, an apologetic wuss who couldn’t even talk about the really big issues–the assaults on our freedoms by our own government at home and the disastrous Iraqi occupation.

I’m beginning to listen more strongly to those lefty bloggers who’ve accused the national Democrats of being co-conspirators in the Republican machine rule, deliberate paid-off dive takers.