Poor George

Someone should have told him that infomercials usually don't run in prime-time.

The White House may be billing President Bush's speech tonight at Ft. Bragg, N.C., as a major national address, but not all the broadcast networks have yet decided to treat it that way.

By Monday night, only ABC had committed to preempting its prime-time shows to carry the speech live at 8 p.m. EDT. CBS, NBC and Fox said they would decide today.

The networks typically preempt prime-time programming to air live presidential speeches or presidential news conferences. But the expected message - that the U.S. effort in Iraq is succeeding - has created a tricky situation for broadcasters, who do not want to appear to be giving the president unfettered air time for a political message.

Part of the problem is that no one believes he's going to say anything new, beyond the "it's hard work" version of the "we're winning and things are getting better" happy-talk, and most of us, including ever-more Republican legislators, don't believe it. And it probably doesn't help that, since his aircraft carrier moment, people recognize when he's just using the troops for stage dressing. (We all know he has no other reason to give the address from Ft. Bragg. Though maybe he's trying to avoid the people back in DC who are urgently trying to deal with the Veteran's Administration budget shortfall.)

And frankly, the Presidential speech production values just can't compete. If I wanted to watch a fictional program involving members of our armed forces, I'd rather watch the re-run of NCIS. And if I wanted to hear about hard work and difficult transitions, the rerun of Trading Spouses would be far more believable.