Seems as though none of the contributors here have enough time to write something of their own about Bush’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday. All I can say is I didn’t watch it except for a few clips I saw on the morning news, and even if I had watched it, I have had no time to write anything.
I did read bits of it in the newspaper, and there are some great commentaries about it out their on the web. I recommend this one by Stephen Zunes.
I also saw a few clips of Jim Webb’s Democratic response, and I liked it. E.J. Dionne has this to say about it:
It may thus be no accident that Jim Webb, Virginia’s new Democratic senator, was once a Reaganite.
In his reply to President Bush’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, Webb defined the two central moral issues that animate most of the Democratic Party’s rank and file: the mess in Iraq and the fact that the fruits of a growing economy are not being shared by all Americans.
Then Webb did something rather astonishing: He didn’t fudge on his language or try to take the hard edge off his impatience with the status quo.
…
There was no mush from Webb. On the contrary, he tried only to make his two points, on Iraq and inequality, and showed what he was upset about.Many Democrats tremble that they will be accused by some right-wing Web site or presidential spokesman of waging class warfare. Webb made clear that there is a class war going on, and that the wrong side is winning it.
“When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did,” Webb said. “Today, it’s nearly 400 times.”
OK, that’s a standard sort of line from your standard progressive speech. But then came this arresting sentence: “In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.”
Examine that closely. How many politicians out there raising campaign contributions from rich people are willing to use “boss,” instead of a more respectful locution?
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On Iraq, Webb did not mince his words about Bush’s responsibility. “The president took us into this war recklessly,” he declared.Instead of qualifying this strong statement, Webb backed it up: “He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the Army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command. …” The list more than supported Webb’s next thought, that “we are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable — and predicted — disarray that has followed.”
And today Pierre Tristam served up this tasty morsel about the end of the Bush presidency and what nasty things to expect while he runs out the clock:
Resigning would be too statesmanlike an act for a man who likes to rule by edicts, and to whom power is its own reward. So we’ll spend the next two years sustaining his chaotic clock-running, watching the flashpoints of disasters he lit up spread their fires from Iraq to Afghanistan to Iran to North Korea, watching the promises he made about New Orleans sink in a flood of indifference and government incompetence, watch the machinery of government, corrupted by his years of nepotism and contempt, become its self-fulfilling prophecy of shoddiness and mistrust. The damage done by the Bush junta in the last six years may yet be outdone by the damage of the next two, because at least in the last six there was the hint that some of the criminals involved in the mugging believed in what they were doing, Bush among them. The faith-based business, remember. Now the worst part of the end of the Bush presidency, the most palpable part of that end, as we saw it on January 10 and again in th e State of the Union , is that Bush himself, like his father in 1992, no longer believes. He’s given up. He quit. As he has always quit. What’s left is the old shell, the reconstructed drunk without a goal, the resentful loser. And there’s nothing more dangerous when he remains, all ridicule aside, the “decider” and worse: the commander-in-chief.
And just for fun, The New York Times has an interactive tool that lets you search for words and their frequency of use in all seven of Bush SOTU speeches. It shows you in which speeches the word was used, how often, where it appears in the text, in what context it was used, and it provides a graph to compare the usage over the years. Check out “oil.” It was mentioned just four times from 2001 to 2006, and nine times last Tuesday.
Have fun…
back to the mention of oil in the state of the union speech. if we attempt to pin a motive, like with a criminal suspect, to the war party, there’s a simple one for spreading the now regional war to iran. say a gulf of tonkin sort of event occurs off the coast of iran. missiles and warcraft fill the skies, perhaps iran falls back to a scorched earth (and gulf) policy, and oil tankers can no longer safely maneuver through the strait of hormuz. oil prices skyrocket.
who wins? the oil men. hmmmm.