If you want to hear a speech real bad…

…you can count on Obama for a real bad speech. Kevin Williamson denounces the whole idea of SOTU speeches, with their increasingly monarchical trappings, in this fiery piece at NRO. A sample:

The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.

It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.

Update: Ron Swanson provides some balance to the utopian left-wing crap you'll be hearing from Obama tonight (or would be, if you were listening).

Update II: Haw! Supreme Court justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas gave the speech a miss.

Update III: The only good thing about Obama's SOTU speech? Stephen Green's drunkblogging.