Another "Maybe this is the day Daddy will stop drinking" pundit moment, this one courtesy of Peggy Noonan, who's writing today about the upcoming State of the Union address and the Bush years in genedral:

It's been an era of soft thinking and hard words.... it's not getting us anywhere. And it's limiting debate. It's making people fearful.

It is time for a kind of verbal amnesty in which thoughts are considered before motives are judged. An admission that the White House is as responsible for this situation as everyone else would help clear the air--and just might prompt some soul-searching in members of the audience. An honest plea here could break through the cement that has hardened over the debate. Who could answer harshly when a president who loves his country admitted the problem and pleaded for change? That's what might really hit reset.

Why on earth do pundits persist in saying things like this? When will they wake up and realize it's never going to happen? Is it really not going to be until he gets on the helicopter on 1/20/09? Or maybe even later, down the line, when he dies? Can we at least hope that then they'll finally smack their foreheads and say, "Gosh, he was always like that, wasn't he?"

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More from Peggy:

Part of the reason the air is so charged now, so highly emotional, is that many of the leaders in the drama seem, lately, to be re-enacting. One senses a number of antiwar politicians are thinking: This is my Bobby Kennedy moment. We are re-enacting 1968. See how I jab the air as I speak against war. On the other side it is 1939, and they are Churchill.

The Bushies have been reenacting, all right, but they're just using 1939 and Churchill for sets and art decoration, like a Shakespeare director who retains the original dialogue but sets As You Like It on Muscle Beach in 1964 and decks out the cast in full Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.

Rove has been reenacting 1988; the war was supposed to be his Willie Horton ad, the one-shot Democrat-killer. Cheney has been reenacting the Watergate years, in the hope that the believers in unchallenged Executive Branch power get to win this time.

Bush? He's reenacting some night he came home drunk and was told, "You're never going to amount to anything! Why can't you be like your brother Jeb?" At that moment, I'm not even sure he knew who Churchill was.