SotU

Whew! What a day. Finally I get around to commenting on what may be the finest speech in the last decade. I took notes but left them at home so I’ll have to rely on my memory and the plethora of commentaries and news articles out there today about the State of the Union. Almost makes you wistful for the old days of the President’s Annual Message doesn’t it?

First off, I have to say I thought the speech was absolutely brilliant – both rhetorically and politically. One of the finest uses of the politician’s trade is to take your enemy’s talking points and make them your own issues. The President did this again and again. The Dems want to whine about the economy? Fine, here’s how we’ll fix things. Old folks are having a tough time and health insurance is too expensive? We can fix that too. The underpriviledged? Yep, got some help for them on the way. What about the environment? How about major new initiatives on that front as well.

How ya like dem apples?

So the first part of the speech was dedicated solely to domestic priorities:

Senior citizens will get to have choice, just like beneficiaries of the Federal Government’s health plans. Brilliant. If it’s good enough for Sen. Daschle, it should be good enough for Gramma and Grampa Kettle. Who can argue that what the politicos and other bureaucrats deserve is wrong for America?

We’ll toss some money towards underpriviledged kids and drug addicts. That ought to put a bit of a band-aid on crime and poverty and, along with Welfare Reform, move us toward a time when everyone gets the same chances as everyone else.

Tax cuts across the board, right bloody now! Spot on, I loved the line about allowing the American people to keep their money. Isn’t it telling that the Democraps couldn’t be bothered to stand and applaud at that remark? Hell, the House Minority Leader – that Californian paragon of left-liberalism – even laughed on national TV! Heh, allowing the American people to keep their own hard-earned money. Wotta scream! Don’t they know there are others more deserving of their money than they?

AIDS relief to Africa. Unprecedented and amazing to all. Not only does this pull the rug from under the Democraps charges of uncaring, unthinking Republicans but it calms the conservative masses who’d certainly object to the spending by couching the effort in purely moral terms. We have the money, we have the power, we can help and what’s more, we have an absolute duty to help.

Then came the two things that made me very happy – a call for a total ban on human cloning and a call for a ban on partial birth abortions. Some call this a sop to the “far right” but in reality all they are is a continuation of the policies already laid out and demonstrating a deep and abiding respect for human life. We are going to spend billions of dollars helping the elderly, the poor and addicted, AIDS sufferers in Africa, etc. Surely we can do no less at home and protect the health, well-being, and very existence of those least able to protect themselves? Partial birth abortion is infanticide for chrissakes! Baby killing! Isn’t it amazing that people who, 40 years ago, spat on American servicemen coming back from a war nobody liked very much and called them “baby killers” find it almost impossible to abhor that very real practice now? So much for the moral compass of the lefties.
Ah, and then the bit I loved best out of the whole speech – the bit about hydrogen powered automobiles. I worry this was tossed in at the last minute – maybe as a sop to environmentalists, maybe to head off the “no blood for oil” rhetoric, maybe because it’s a wonderful way to move our interests away from the Middle East and “an important step toward helping the Saudis get back to their roots as goatherds and tribal bandits.” Who knows? For my part, I found it Kennedy-esque. With a timetable it could have been as energizing and spectacular as the old challenge “to send a man to the moon in this decade.” Just think of the possibilities!

And then, on to Iraq and the rest of the Axis of Evil. I think I’ll leave off here as I’ve already written a lot and there’s a lot to digest. More later.