I got up this morning to read President Bush’s SOTU message and Senator Webb’s response. (Last night was Drinking Liberally, and we had special guests, Mayoral candidate Tom Knox and Councilman candidate Sharif Street. Knox was someone my Republican wife is very interested in, so I got her to the event for a change.) Webb’s response fairly drips with sarcasm, or at least could with the right inflection and delivery. The Washington Post calls Webb’s speech a “blunt challenge.” Again, I’ve only read the text of the speech, and won’t see the entire speech delivered until later.

It isn’t just the war in Iraq where Webb gets in sarcastic zingers. I love the reference to Bush’s energy plan, for instance. In what should be a conciliatory section of the speech where Mr. Webb highlights the Democrats wanting to work with the Pretzelnit, he also notes that this is the seventh time Bush has urged us to free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. If he’s got to say it seven times, doesn’t that say a little teensy bit about how badly Bush has failed to implement a rational energy policy?

As to the War in Iraq, Jim Webb seemed the right man for the job for this speech. I like the invocation of a few words in this section. “Trusted,” “hoped,” and “owed,” and the use of the past tense, indicate strongly that Mr. Bush can’t be trusted, he does not provide hope, and he does not pay the debts he owes to the soldiers fighting for America.

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues ­ those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death ­ we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm’s way.

We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us ­ sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

Man, I can hear the force of this speech in my head, and I’m hoping like Hell that Web did some sort of justice to it. Like the very next paragraph — there’s a line we should cut and paste over our desks:

The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable ­ and predicted ­ disarray that has followed.

I’m guessing the FauxNews gang will find a way to paint Senator Webb as a traitor any moment now, that is if his delivery was effective last night. The disdain in this speech is too effective for them to ignore and still boost the Pretzelnit, their raison d’etre. Or maybe. . . could FauxNews jump ship on the President and not take off with some spurious charge against Webb? It’ll be interesting to see this morning.