Demagogue

I stepped away from the TV briefly and missed the "Kodak moment" in last night's State of the Union address, but a good friend of mine caught every second of it. Janet Norwood, the mother of a 25-year-old Marine slain in Iraq, hugged Safia Taleb al-Suhail, an Iraqi woman whose family had suffered under Saddam's repression.

That hug inspired the following e-mail from my friend:

Did you see the state of the union tonight? Couldn't you just lose your dinner?

Especially that big, fat Iraqi woman who hugged that poor gal who lost her son ... (she) was no symbol of Iraqi oppression. She didn't look like she'd suffered under Saddam any in her designer jacket. She looked like she'd been bouncing between the Elizabeth Arden counter and the Krispy Kreme counter.

Couldn't they at least have found someone a little hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked? As the poster girl for "why dead American soldiers were worth it," she didn't cut it.

Bitchy, snarky comments? Absolutely. And I quite enjoyed them.