First the war on terror, now…

The president’s State of the Union address happens in about an hour or so, and many are predicting GWB will focus on his one strong suit (the war on terror) and attempt to position himself for re-election this fall.

But off the radar, at least until this afternoon (except at the prescient Washington Blade newspaper last week), is the news that the president will also tackle the issue of same-sex marriage, declaring as he has done before that marriage should be between a man and a woman. But, CNN reports, White House chief of staff Andrew Card is saying Bush is prepared to announce that "if necessary, he'd be glad to support a constitutional change" to support that idea.

WWP has often wondered: After terrorists, who’s the target of the next holy war?

Now we know.

Comments

[Lindsay]

When you parse all the statements coming out on this it's clear The White House will toss chunks of red meat rhetoric to the religious enthusiasts, as Reagan did on abortion, and without doing anything else. The key to placating stroppy constituencies on the right or left is leaving the door open the possiblity that something MIGHT be done, sometime, some day.

Besides, the issue isn't polling big numbers,there's no big pressure for an amendment, and a lot of leading conservative thinkers have weighed in against it.

Most telling is the comments of RNC Chair Ed Gillespie the other day. Quoted on The Advocate's website, he said gay marriage will only be a national issue if activists try to move it out of Massachusets and federalize it.

Bush got a quarter of the gay vote in 2000- about a milion votes. That's nothing to toss away in an election they privately believe will be as close as 2000 was. Plus, they know what Pat Buchanan's culture war speech cost Bush I in 1992: it enraged gay voters, whom Bill Clinton then effortlessly scooped up. Finally, they know they have a fighting chance in California, riding the gay-friendly, new sort of Republican governor there.

But it's a political year, which is why The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force's Matt Foreman put out a press release on the president's pro-family initiative that talked about everything but the initiative itself (well, they threw in a graph or two at the end of a very long story; at the top was an attack on the president's jobs record, which seems tangential at best).

This is just more of what Chris Bull and his co-author documented a decade ago in "Perfect Enemies" : that the religious right and the big gay groups need each other to remain relevant and raise money.

[Jack Bog]

Nucular! Terism!

[Lindsay]

I've always wondered why people who mock the current president's pronunciation of nuclear don't when Jimmy Carter says it the same way.

[beerick]

Carter was less likely to use them? Good call on that one WWP...his defence of marriage comments were among the most offensive of his comments that I saw.

[Worldwide Pablo]

During the GOP-driven applause following GWB's endorsement of a federal marriage amendment, Worldwide Pablo had to stifle involuntary vomiting as the television flashed on Sen. Rick "Sanctimonious" Santorum.

Please! Not while WWP is eating dinner...

[PS: "Nucular" and "terism," by the way, were only the start. Who says "100" is pronounced: "one hun derd"? The president's speech transcends regionalisms. WWP has countless Texans in his family tree, mostly from the wrong side of the tracks, by the way. And none of them speak as poorly as the president.]

[Lindsay]

Then let's start a segment on linguistic eccentricities and regional accents for all the cadidates and see what else we can find.