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I would have live-blogged the inaugeration but apparently everyone in America was watching it on TV today so there didn’t seem to be much point.   But here were the things that caught my eye:

• Aretha Franklin kicked ass.  As did Yo-Yo Ma and Izhak Perlman and those other two.   Nicely multi-cultural too in a nice, natural, welcome-to-America way.
• That was a pretty good poem.  It was no Frost but in her defense, Frost just re-used one of his earlier hits.  Way, way better than Maya Angelou’s pendantic, overly-long, snooze-fest in 1992.  This is a poem I’d actually be willing to read again.
• That speech — it was only so-so.  Sorry.  I know everyone wanted it to be  be brilliant but it ended up being a weird mixture of really good and soaring and really prosaic.  Electric grids?  Really?
• Boy, Rick Warren was amazingly awful.  This was his big chance and frankly, he didn’t deliver, reminding us again that for Rick Warren, the only thing that matters is  Rick Warren.  That smattering of applause?  Probably the best he’s going to get for the next four years.  (But hey, feel free to disagree.) Now,  if you were looking for a prayer, Joseph Lowry had a pretty damn good one – except for that wird stuff at the end that meant something only to people over 50 and was slightly offensive to everyone else.  And then the best one was the one that no one heard — Gene Robinson’s prayer on  Sunday opening the inaugral festivities.
• Man, Michelle Obama is so amazingly cool.   She brought Laura Bush a hostess gift.  A hostess gift!  Even though she’s the one moving in.  And thank  you, thank you, thank you for not wearing 1) blue or red, 2) a hat or 2) Dianne Feinstein’s 1960s Betty Crocker hairdo.  You looked good, girl.  Real good.

And what sounds better than President Barak Obama?  Say it with me, folks: Former President George W. Bush.

Related posts:

1. It’s morning in America
2. I’d like to talk to you about your son’s progress, America.
3. Oh America, how I cringe for thee