SOTU Thoughts

Okay folks, here are a few quick thoughts on the State of the Union speech.

• In short, I wasn’t impressed by it. Seriously. Just about every statement Bush Junior made was the same as he made it for every other SOTU speech and for every other speech he has made in the past four years. Repeat, rehash, plagiarized words recycled over and over again with prepared applause marks inserted to make it seem like the people like what he’s been doing for the past year.

• “America is addicted to oil…” Well no kidding! And being an oil-man yourself, you helped to facilitate that addiction! But your solutions? They’re about as empty as your words. You talk about alternative fuels and calling for a commission and toss up ideas, but you forgot about all of the stuff you mentioned the last time! What happened to the talk about the hydropower fuel cells? It sort of lost steam once the news got out that the car actually exists and is currently being tested!

• “The economy is strong”… BULLCRAP, bubble-boy! You talk with the people working for Ford, General Motors, Kraft Foods, and every other company that announced big layoffs recently about how “strong” the economy is. You talk to the people who are going into bankruptcy just trying to keep their house heated this winter. You talk to those people and you’ll get a much different view about the economy than what your scriptwriters are telling you.

• You want WHAT? The line-item veto? Uh, excuse me, Earth to Bush Junior: YOU ALREADY HAVE IT! Your friends in the GOP bent over backwards to make sure that you have that power. You’re the first president in U.S. history to enjoy that kind of power! But never mind the line-item veto for a minute… when was the last time you ever vetoed anything? Come on! Name one instance! Give me ONE TIME when you actually put pen to paper and wrote down V-E-T-O on a bill! The truth is, sir, you’ve never vetoed a single bill while you were President! Not one! So don’t be bitching and crying about power that you’ve NEVER exercised but have had since the day you stepped into the Oval Office. You have to wonder if the speechwriters just grabbed any sort of quick clip from the Reagan era to kill time and hoped that nobody noticed.

• By the way, I don’t know why the media is continually asking the White House about their continued disobedience of the FISA court process. “If someone in America is talking to Al Qaeda, we want to know!” Well that’s EXACTLY what the FISA court is all about. And it’s not like the White House will slip up and say “well, yes, we’re knowingly and willingly violating the US Constitution because we don’t give a damn about that stupid piece of paper.” It’s not going to happen! At most, all they’re going to do is come with a brand new excuse. And bear in mind that both liberals AND conservatives are sounding off on this issue, so don’t think for a moment that this is just a liberal red herring. So let’s just go ahead with the investigation, get the facts out, and then make the determination if they violated the Constitution and whether anyone needs to be indicted, impeached, etc.

• Let’s talk about the “Democratic Response” for a minute… “There is a better way…” Yeah, there is, but nobody but Libertarians had the courage to vote Libertarian in 2004, so we’re stuck with the choices that we made, and just saying that there is a “better way” doesn’t mean that yours IS that “better way”.

• The only good thing that the Dems did was they put a fresh face on the TV. No Hillary Clinton, no Teddy Kennedy, no John Kerry… and definitely no Nancy Pelosi! My god that woman could scare small children! Unfortunately their response was still a big snoozer. And what was up with a separate SPANISH-speaking Democratic Response? What the hell was that all about? What’s next? Are the Dems going to run through the whole gambit of special interest responses next year? “And now Democratic Response for blind lesbian environmentalist hemophiliacs who only speak Latin.”

Well, last but not least, we have the ever-popular FREEDOM COUNT!

• The President, in his State of the Union speech, gave lip service to freedom by saying it 17 times. He also said the word “liberty” four times. Unfortunately he also contradicted that talk about freedom and liberty by pushing for the renewal of the freedom-hating PATRIOT Act and by continuing his claim that somehow Article II of the US Constitution gives him the right to subvert the rest of that document anytime he wants.

• The Democrats, as usual, did far worse in the Freedom Count. Their normal rebuttal never mentioned the word “freedom” at all and only mentioned “liberty” a whopping TWO times! The Spanish rebuttal, however, didn’t mention either “freedom” or “liberty” at all. That's not good folks!

If the Dems want to gain support beyond their limited base, they need to start using those two words more often. Maybe if they put John Murtha on the screen they would have had a better response.