And suddenly dolphins appeared

Peggy Noonan waxes euphoric on the SOTU:

Suddenly his tone changed and something like his focus and concentration changed. And suddenly it was Iraq, and suddenly he was making the case that seemed to me so strong that it seemed new.

And it seemed in an odd way family-based, as if he were talking about mom and pop and saying this is not about geopolitical abstractions. This is about keeping us safe. Let me tell you what we know from intelligence, from British reports, from American reports, from people who are in jail now. So that was big stuff. Big.

Sure it was. After all, the base message is clear:

"War is peace."

Or, as Brian Zick writes by e-mail: "A war initiated to preemptively prevent war, to preserve peace."

The very word "war," therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. -- Orwell, 1984