Count Me Blue: My thoughts on Bush's State of the Union

I've been stewing about President Bush's State of the Union Speech for a few weeks now, and to be honest, I've been a bit too busy to have the time to finish off my thoughts - the beginning of the semester, along with our trip to Vegas have both not allowed me to have much time to write (plus a nasty cold that I'm fighting), but I'm ready at last.

But, before I comment on Bush's last relevant State of the Union speech, I figured it would be cool to look at his SOTU from a few years ago. Watch the clip above, and then read on...

Too funny, eh? God, I have to add video-editing capabilities to my list of New Year's resolutions. I got a kick out of that one.

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Before getting to my comments, the clip above is worth a look - it's of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann did a quick review of Bush's past SOTU speeches.

Okay, on to Bush's real speech, delivered a little over two weeks ago. Better late than never, right?

Bush's last SOTU address that even matters (next year’s will be an irrelevant lame duck speech, and his '09 goodbye will be a yawner, just like Clinton's was in January '01) should have aired on Comedy Central, because it was about the funniest speech I've ever heard him deliver.

First, I laughed out loud when I heard Bush intone that he's ready for bipartisanship and to work with Democrats. Anyone who's paid attention to five minutes of Bush's Presidency knows that line is fit for the B.S. Hall of Fame. Bush and his speechwriters must really hold the American public in low regard, if they think we are this frickin' stupid.

A few things about Bush's bipartisan olive branch, and I'll move on to other topics of his speech. When you include the '00 presidential primaries and election, Bush and his Rasputin, Karl Rove, have spent the last seven years doing their best to divide, conquer and scare the American electorate, and they've been mostly successful.

During the Bush Presidency, whenever it's an election year, the playbook has become all too predictable – terrorism, 9-11, terrorism, 9-11, abortion and its first cousin - stem cell research, terrorism, 9-11, gay marriage, terrorism, terrorism, 9-11, Iraq was a danger *cough cough Al-Quaeda – hey we didn’t say that!*, terrorism, 9-11, ban flag burning, terrorism, 9-11, etc. You get the idea. And they've been able to get away with it, because, up until the '06 election, voters have not given this administration a proper check and balance in the form of Democratic control in one or both Houses of Congress. But, all that’s changed now, and Bush is putting on his bipartisan face, a face that even a passive follower of politics knows is about as genuine as Pamela Anderson’s bust.

So, he comes before the American people, congratulates Nancy Pelosi (that must have reeeeeeeeaaaaaalllllllllly hurt) and then proclaims he's ready to work with Democrats. Like he has a choice! I would have given the president credit had he sounded a note of magnanimity when Republicans were still in control of Congress, but for him to say that now is the sound of a desperate man. And I like seeing him desperate. It's a face I wish he had to wear long before now, but history's history – nothing to be gained by looking back now.

Anyway, the one thing that really irked me from jump was how he referred to the Democratically controlled Congress:

"Some in this chamber are new to the House and the Senate, and I congratulate the Democrat majority," said Bush.

How childish. One may expect a certain level of churlishness (and sometimes, vulgarity) from a progressive, liberal blogger *ahem*, but not from the President of the United States.

(Oh, and before Bill O'Reilly, six months from now, gets on the air during his Fox News Show and declares, "Bush never said it! Never said it!" click on the link of the transcript from the Washington Post Here.)

This is the kind of stuff that makes me truly despise people like Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who rates a close second behind Karl Rove on my political hate meter. It's people like Luntz who make me ashamed that I teach public relations. I really mean that. To people like him, it's not the policy or the position that's important, it's how you say it. One could imagine him working for Adolf Hitler and advising him: "It's not the Final Solution, Mr. Hitler. Let’s call it Jewish relocation." I mean, really? Could Luntz (and Bush, by his use of this phrase) be any more petty or spiteful about the Democratic victory last November?

After the speech, there were even traditionally strong conservatives were on TV poking fun at the president's having said "Democrat Majority": Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews, to name a few.

Seriously, can you imagine if Clinton had done that during his presidency? I truly believe Fox News would have been calling for Congress to go to Defcon 2. Well, I don't mean to keep repeating myself, but it was petty and stupid (and don’t think for a second it was unintentional), but there were even better laughers in the speech, for sure.

The president's health care initiative is dead on arrival, as it should be. The last time Bush tried to sell us something this disingenuous, it was the privatization of Social Security. Now, the president wants to find another way to award his corporate buddies (Read: political donors),

while simultaneously sticking it to the middle class, right where the sun doesn’t shine. Sorry, Mr. President – I know the difference between you-know-what from Shinola.

It's truly amazing that even a president with the set the size of Bush's could bring this before Congress and the American people. He now wants people who are lucky enough to have medical benefits through their jobs to have those benefits taxed? He must be joking, right? Someone please e-mail me and tell me when his real State of the Union speech is, because this has got to be April Fool's Day, but earlier. Wait, maybe we were all being Punk'd?

I admittedly won't pretend to know all of the fine print of the Bush's health care proposal, but so far, from what I've read, I’m less than impressed, as are most experts. It's amazing how hard most Republicans fight against doing the right thing on Social Security and Universal Health Care. I've previously blogged about Social Security, so I won't get into it much here, other than to reiterate once more that there was never anything urgently wrong with Social Security in the first place. It wasn't due to go broke for decades, yet GOPers saw that as a great excuse to try and mess with a system that has worked for nearly 70 years, all the while promising that "current recipients will receive no reduction in their checks." It doesn't take a genius to read between the lines in that statement: "If you're years away from retirement, count on getting a lot less than you thought."

I've been paying into the system since I was 15 years old, and now you’re telling me I'm going to see greatly reduced benefits so your buddies on Wall Street can get some of my money to play with under the guise of "private accounts?" Dream on. I've done plenty of reading on what Bush wanted to do with Social Security, and it was just another way to award his big political donors – stock brokers, big business, accountants, and a whole slew of other people who are just dying to get their mitts on some of the billions in the Social Security trust. No sale. And thankfully, the American public wasn't buying it, either. Funny how I haven't heard Bush mention Social Security recently. He knows it's DOA, just like he knows his new scheme for health benefits will suffer the same fate.

As far as universal health coverage, I don’t think I'll ever understand why our government just cannot or will not get it done. As wealthy of a country as we are (at least in theory – actually, Bush is bankrupting us, but that's another post), it's stupefying how politicians can sleep at night knowing that tens of millions of Americans lack health care.

Oh well, on to other topics.

I loved his comments on balancing the federal budget, without raising taxes. One could audibly hear the laughter when the president uttered that doozy. In the name of political ideology, Bush would rather bankrupt future generations than get the government back on the right course by repealing his ludicrous tax cuts from earlier this decade that were enacted in the first place on projected surpluses that no one really believed were going to come to fruition, anyway. (And those rosy predictions were before 9-11 and the contemporary War on Terrorism.)

Fast-forward to the president’s radio address from yesterday, when Bush warned that there will have to be domestic spending cuts to keep the budget in "balance," or his version of balanced, anyway. Bush calling for "fiscal discipline" in Washington during his SOTU speech is analogous to Mark Foley chairing the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. Oops.

One of my favorite parts of his speech, though, was his calls for energy independence. Coming from a president and his party, both of whom have done nothing to that end in nearly six years, it rang pretty hollow. Even more hilarious was Vice President Dick Cheney, who visibly snickers from behind the president’s shoulder. (See the YouTube clip above.) It was almost as if Dick was snickering to the rest of us, "I know something you don’t know." When it comes to the Big Oil, there's plenty that Dick knows. Big Oil hasn’t been performing energy exploration, it's been exploitation.

I do give Bush at least some credit in a few areas, though:

1. Taking a stand against fossil fuels at all, since he’s done little more than lip service during his presidency. We'll see if this is more of the same, or if he really means it.

2. Calling on increased nuclear power production. No question about it, this is a critical part of our energy solution. However, we need to find a way to safely store the waste. Yucca Mountain appears dead in the water, so proposing increases in the number of nuclear plants requires a solution to this problem, too, and there aren't any easy answers.

3. Bush acknowledged global warming, which is no small admission by this president. But, I'm sure this will prove to be hollow, but I pray it doesn't. I’ll be writing lots more on global warming in the next day or two – it's been in the news quite a bit this past week.

As usual, his speech contained plenty of fear mongering about the War on Terrorism. His rehashed bravado about stopping a plot to fly an airliner into the tallest building on the west coast is older than old news. That one I knew about, but Keith Olbermann discovered plenty of other instances, too. Check out the YouTube clip above.

The president's call to increase the size of our active armed forces by 92,000 over the next five years is seems like small potatoes to me. If I were president, I’d double that, and while I was at it, I'd damn near double the pay of what our soldiers are getting now, which isn't much. Sure, the cost would be high, but you know what would cost even more, in terms of money and blood? Restituting the draft. And if we keep going the way we are, that's precisely what we are going to have to do.

Most incredible is not one word in his speech about New Orleans or Hurricane Katrina, despite the fact that the city isn't even close to being where it was before the storm about 18 months ago. (I mentioned this in an earlier post yesterday.)

And then there was Bush's call for America to continue to support the "cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus and Burma," and to "continue to awaken the conscience of the world to save the people of Darfur."

Two things – 1. Thank God we've got Belarus, Burma and Cuba covered, and 2. What in the world has the president done for the people of Darfur? It sounds good for the press to mention it, but what has Bush really done?

I do give Bush credit for increasing U.S. funding to combat AIDS in Africa, and other humanitarian aid, too. Bush remarked:

"We hear the call to take on the challenges of hunger and poverty and disease. And that is precisely what America is doing. We must continue to fight HIV/AIDS, especially on the continent of Africa. Because you funded the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the number of people receiving life-saving drugs has grown from 50,000 to more than 800,000 in three short years. I ask you to continue funding our efforts to fight HIV/AIDS. And I ask you to provide $1.2 billion over five years so we can combat malaria in 15 African countries."

Again, it's a start, but we could and should be doing so much more. Too bad Bush is so ideologically driven and that this administration won’t fund family planning in Africa, which would also go really far in helping combat AIDS. I know what many religious people believe, too: "Don’t have sex and you can’t get AIDS." I'm not going to get into that too much now, other than to say that it’s as myopic as it is unrealistic.

Even better than Bush's speech is some of the coverage after it. Here are two clips of coverage that I found entertaining – Keith Olbermann (of course!) and a pretty ignorant clip from Fox News, with college drop-out Sean Insanity and another rube named Karen Hanretty. Pretty entertaining.