State of The Union Quick Hits

Here’s my immediate thoughts on Bush’s State of the Union speech:

• I admit it, I was wrong. My money was on Bush mentioning September 11 within 60 seconds of starting his speech, but it didn’t happen for three minutes and 33 seconds. I stand humbled by his restraint.

• Once again a despicable display of using a dead Marine’s heartfelt, written words for his own partisan political gain and to try to save his butt on the Iraq war. Disgusting.

• In trying to reframe his domestic spying scandal as part of a legitimate war in terror, Bush said “If there are people inside of our country talking to al Qaeda we want to know about it.” This points out his ongoing logic flaw on this subject in that they always claim that they’re only spying on people talking to known al Qaeda operatives. If this is true, they must know who the al Qaeda people are – why the hell don’t they just go get them?

• Bush discussed tax cuts in the context of helping all American families even though they clearly only benefit our wealthiest citizens.

• Democrats stood and applauded when Bush tried to chide the Congress for not embracing his Social Security scheme and really showed him up by using the failure of his plan as reason for a standing ovation.

• On the war on terror, he said “We are in this fight to win and we are winning.” The terror statistics for the last five years say otherwise. Stay tuned for those tomorrow morning.

All in all, more of the same message to Americans: Continue to be afraid, trust him despite all of his lies and everyone should play nice together – except, of course, his side of the political aisle.