State Of The Union

Think Progress is reporting that last night's State of the Union Address "received the lowest level of positive reaction from viewers of President Bush’s tenure." I watched most of it. I loved the part when, after Bush mentioned that Congress failed to act on the BushCo plan to privatize social security, all the Democrats stood up and gave that comment a standing ovation. It was great.

But I'm finding it more difficult each day to watch Bush give a speech. And I'm not just saying that because I dislike him. I'm embarrassed to have Bush as our president. Other American generations had strong leadership during difficult times, but we get this guy. God must really hate us.

Anyway, I can certainly understand why last night's speech received the lowest level of positive reaction of any of Bush's SOTU addresses. As I've mentioned before, Bush likes to talk about how we are AT WAR, but his actions (tax cuts during "war-time," cuts in the Army Reserve, etc.) do not correspond with his talk. As I was listening to Bush speak, all I could think about was Grover Norquist's statement that he wants to of cut government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bath tub."

Well, that is not entirely true. I was also thinking about this article from Monday's Boston Globe, wherein the author asks a very important question:

Here is the embarrassing question: Is America actually at war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, war cries, even war crimes -- but do we have war? We have war dead, but the question remains. With young US soldiers being blown up almost daily, it can seem an absurd question, an offensive one. With thousands of Iraqis killed by American firepower, it can seem a heartless question, as if the dead care whether strict definitions of ''war" are fulfilled. There can be no question that Iraq is in a state of war, and that, whatever its elements of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, the warfare is being driven from the Pentagon.

In his speech last night, Bush cited the War on Terror, saying, among other things, that "we will never surrender to evil." It is this War On Terror that BushCo uses to justify its illegal "Terrorist Surveillance Program." But as the Boston Globe piece points out:

[T]he war on terrorism is not real war either, since the Pentagon has proven itself incapable of actually engaging Al Qaeda. That, of course, is because Al Qaeda is a free floating nihilism, not a nation, or even a network. Al Qaeda is a rejectionist idea to which deracinated miscreants are drawn, like filings to a magnet, but that drawing power is generated in Washington. Bin Laden was a self-mythologized figure of no historic standing until George W. Bush designated him America's equal by defining 9/11 as an act of war to be met with war, instead of a crime to be met with criminal justice. But this over-reaction, so satisfying at the time to the wounded American psyche, turned into the war for which the other party simply did not show up. Which is, of course, why we are blasting a substitute Iraq to smithereens.

I would love it if the Democrats started talking this way, but I doubt that a single one of them has the guts.