State of the Union
From The Nation’s write up:
As predicted, the president’s last State of the Union speech echoed the empty rhetoric of the speeches that came before it. There was an extended call on Congress to make permanent the tax cuts for the rich that have so skewed the nation’s economic balance since Bush secured them. There were attacks on spending by a president who has presided over the dramatic bloating of deficits that are the spawn of unsustainable spending. There were more defenses of free-trade pacts that have harmed workers, the environment and communities in the United States and abroad. And there were more fantastical claims about the successes of the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, summed the evening up best when she said, “Tonight’s speech is the ’swan song’ of a presidency that is ending and will not be missed. President Bush may choose to believe that the state of our union is strong; but under his direction, our economy is flailing, our infrastructure is crumbling, the number of uninsured and underinsured Americans is rising, America’s moral and strategic leadership in the world is plummeting, our Constitution is being trampled, and our servicemen and women and their families are sacrificing enormously in an unnecessary war.”
Bush regurgitated every fetid leitmotif of his failed presidency, and ignored all of his personal and political failings. His declaration of war on earmarks — after 6 years of unbridled greed embodied in earmarks from the Republican-led Congress culminating in the famed “Bridge to Nowhere” — was a pathetic example of rank hypocrisy, as was his insistence that we must balance the budget, after running up the largest debts in history and adding $3.5 trillion to the national tab.
In the last seven years he has signed spending bills containing about 55,000 earmarks worth more than $100 billion for projects like a new lane for a local road, a new facade for a town landmark or a weapons contract for a company that happened to be a big donor to an influential lawmaker.
Such projects tucked into the endnotes of complex spending bills at the request of individual lawmakers with almost no oversight have contributed to a mounting pileup of waste and corruption, including sending the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the former congressman Randy Cunningham, a California Republican, to jail.
Now, in the last year of his presidency he is against all the kinds of naked abuses fostered by Karl Rove, his top advisor, in the bid to create a permanent Republican majority.
Froomkin pegged it — Running on Empty:
In his final State of the Union address, President Bush had almost nothing to say. Certainly nothing new and significant. Nothing remotely memorable.
It’s a safe bet that nothing he said last night will amount to much. Nothing he said will help bring the country together, or undo the damage he has done to American interests abroad. Nothing he said will help him win back the trust or support of the American people, both which he lost a long time ago.
Froomkin has an excellent rundown on responses to the rhetorical claims of success in the final SOTU.
The speech itself was a minor debacle, with Bush coming across as an unserious and confident ignoramus. Thank God it will be his last SOTU.
