In the gap where arguments and examples should be, President Obama instead invoked God, mentioning Him five times, more than He was mentioned in the inaugural addresses of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Teddy Roosevelt  and George W. Bush put together. For all that "Bush 43" is supposed by liberal intellectuals to have been in thrall to the Christian Right, he  mentioned God only six times in his inaugural addresses (three times each) to Obama's ten (five times each).

"We will respond to the threat of climate change," promised the president, "knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations . . . The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it." Though shale gas is admittedly not a renewable source, it is a potentially vast one, capable of making America self-sufficient in energy for many decades, yet do not expect much support for it in the second term of an administration that also turned down the enormous opportunities represented by the Canadian pipeline. "We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries," Obama nonetheless said with a completely straight face. "We must claim its promise."

Obama's attack on conservative Republicans — "We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate" — was undertaken while demanding national unity behind his policies. Small wonder that Paul Ryan, who was also attacked during a previous State of the Union speech, was grinning widely throughout; the surprise is that he didn't burst out laughing at the sheer hypocrisy of it all. "Obviously it's not designed to bring us together," Mitch McConnell concluded, "and certainly not designed to deal with the transcendent issue of our era, which is deficit and debt." 

There, in a nutshell, is the trajectory of the next four years for America: a constant teetering on a fiscal cliff of its own making until the swing of the economic pendulum saves it, and the substitution of spectacle for politics by the very man who denounces it. 

The State of the Union (known to political analysts as Sotu) speech, which the president has to render Congress every year, has been given in person every year since Woodrow Wilson in 1913, and on television every year since Harry Truman in 1948, but it was not until the 1960s that it became a partisan occasion, and not until relatively recently that it has been made utterly ludicrous by the amount and length of sycophantic applauding that takes place from the party of whichever president is delivering it. President Obama's Sotu on February 12 was interrupted by applause no fewer than 101 times, once for 36 seconds, twice for 20 seconds, and so on, with at least 20 standing ovations, at least from the Democratic side of the aisle.  By contrast the Republicans generally sat on their hands, or sent tweets from the Chamber. (Over 1.36 million tweets were sent around America commenting on Sotu and the lacklustre reply given it by Senator Marco Rubio afterwards.)