LIVE postcard from Bob's house, where we're watching the State of the Union

There are nine of us here -- Bob Carlton, friends from his church, his wife and children, and a cameraman from channel five news. One man is scribbling on a notebook; I'm banging on a laptop. Some of us watch with concern and some with patience.

Bush is praising his regime's work. He's boasting about his confidence in pursuing his own plan; he boasts that we are winning in Iraq. He warns that without him the "violent will inherit the earth."

But Christians, who know that the Meek will inherit the earth: not the violent certainly, but equally not the boastful, and not those who don't watch how their actions incite worse violence.

I wonder if Christians, then, piqued by this twisting of Christ's words, shouldn't be put off by Bush's show of bravado.

In 2006, Americans know that we are *not* winning the war in Iraq. We know that Bush has barely altered the tactics of his army and of intelligence; that America still wars in Iraq blind to a real agenda. They deserve more than glib justification that Bush's four-year-campaign of violence begetting violence will yet bequeath "freedom."

I'll be posting in the "forums" section of CrossLeft as we watch, react to, and discuss the rest of the speech. It's good to be around Christians as a president who plays with the language of the Bible talks about how he is and is not accountable for the state of America: together, we have a chance to hold him accountable to both own words, the Biblical language he uses, a higher state of values, and a higher calling for America.

We sit here besides candles, photographs of Irish cottages, a wooden crucifix, and the pictures of relatives that ornament Bob's hearth. Many of us are made cold by the promises of politicians whom we have seen failing a moral, let alone Christian, calling, time and again. But it is indeed warming to be in the company of other Christians as we watch, and formulate the values that are so lacking in America, and the promise to restore them that is disturbingly absent so far in Bush's speech.