It was an amazing sight to watch.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi briskly informs the White House that she wants the traditional presidential State of the Union speech canceled because of the government shutdown.

Mind you, a State of the Union has never been arbitrarily canceled by a Speaker of the House in the entire history of the country.

To begin, for a very long stretch of American history, these were written documents only. It took Woodrow Wilson to bring back the long abandoned idea that a president goes to Capitol Hill to personally deliver the address. In modern times, the invention of television began changing the entire speech into more of a show. In my lifetime the early televised State of the Union speeches were delivered at high noon.Somewhere around the LBJ era they were moved to prime time to attract a massive national audience - an easy task with only three broadcast networks in existence showing the same thing.

As I distinctly recall from days as a Reagan White House aide, the1986 State of the Union was postponed - because the Challenger space shuttle flight had exploded on take-off that day or the day before. President Reagan quickly decided to postpone the speech, instead addressing the nation from the Oval Office and spending the next few days in his role as "comforter-in-chief" to the grieving families and the nation. Then, it was back to business and the State of the Union show went on.

What makes the events surrounding the Pelosi cancellation so hilarious was spot lit