Last night marked a unique event the history of the SOTU. The response was a real speech. Jim Webb spoke for the Democrats the way an opposition party should. But it was not just a counter-point to Bush's policies. He stood as a sharp contrast to the man himself. He was a kind of anti-Bush.

Whatever the spinmeisters are making of this speech, it was far more than a military man stating clear opposition to the debacle in Iraq. It was a refutation of the entire Bush Presidency; and of the direction the country has been moving in for some time with bipartisan complicity. What none of the pundits seem to want to talk about is Jim Webb's populism. He speaks like a man of the people and about the issues that effect all of us, with an empathy that comes from having lived the life of an average American.

When Jim Webb spoke about taking the picture of his active-duty father to bed with him every night, I don't think there was a parent listening who didn't feel a visceral pang. I know I did. I know my husband did. We thought of our own daughter staring mystified from her car seat as he boarded a plane to Iraq.

Multimillion dollar cold war style weaponry; absolutely. Body armor and working equipment for our troops; not so much.

Ralph Peters's recent column in the New York Post (or here) lays bare the anatomy of the very "military industrial complex" that a tough old soldier known as Ike warned us about many years ago. Writes Peters:

Our ground forces are being driven hard, with many soldiers and Marines already on their third assignments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps do the bleeding and dying. And even as we're able to gradually reduce our troop levels in Iraq, the need for robust land forces to cope with other looming crises is indisputable.

Yet, instead of beefing up the forces that do the actual fighting, the Pentagon self-justification process known as the "Quadrennial Defense Review," or QDR, is about to call for increasing the buy of the F/A-22, a pointless air-to-air fighter with a $280-million-per-copy price tag, while acquiring high-tech destroyers designed to defeat a vanished Soviet navy.