Welp, it's that time of year again - the State of the Union address. I suppose I could bypass any real discussion of it for a series of well-deserved ad-hominems or something like that, but us Zoners tend to hold ourselves to higher standards, and are prone to feigning sentience while writing about whatever strikes our fancy. George W. Bush is more likely to strike my blood pressure or my osteoporotic pet camel's back, but at the same time I think political ignorance is a bad thing. I was unable to actually see or hear the address live last night, the TV being occupied by Other Powers and CBC radio inexplicably not covering it for the first time in awhile. Other Zoners saw the address live, and are going to post their own thoughts; rumour has it that we'll have a guest column by one of the readers, as well. In the meantime, I'm going to go by the transcript which is available in just about every major media outlet, read it, and commit my thoughts on it to screen for you all to see. This involves reading one of George W. Bush's speeches, but I'm doing it anyway.
You guys owe me.
Getting straight to the point, the address was about what I expected it to be - that is to say, a litany of lies, spin and self-aggrandizement, accompanied with mudslinging, FUDslinging, and vaguely-veiled imperial dialogue. If it isn't obvious, my political slant is way off to the left of many people, although not quite so far as other writers on this blog, or other kooks who help make the world the storm of opinion that it is. On the other hand, whatever your biases are, some things are simply not true. A lot of things can be left open for interpretation ("It's a good thing Saddam is gone"), but some other things ("We have found WMDs in Iraq") are simply False. This type of talk - a combination of really shaky spin and outright lying - is a major focus of Bush's speech, and as a result my analysis of it will be less analysis than rebuttal. That said, let's go on.
One of the first things that was kind of surprising was the missing Cabinet secretary at the address. For those not in the know, everyone's in on the show at the State of the Union - president, VP, cabinet, Joint Chiefs, and both sides of both levels of Congress, with a token group missing to ensure government continuity. As a result, two Democrats and Republicans from Congress, and one Cabinet secretary, are generally absent in case the capital gets nuked or sinks into the Potomac. Usually the missing secretary is someone high up - either last year or the year before, it was John Ashcroft - but this year it was Don Evans, Secretary of Commerce. I'd called Ashcroft or Ridge as the chosen successor for this year[1], but it was this relative unknown in terms of clout. Obviously, Commerce is a major position in any federal government. It's the one Canada chooses for political assassination appointments.[2] However, the Bush Administration has had State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security as its most prominent, most-used secretaries, to the point where it feels that some are being groomed for succession anyway. Bush's decision to include all of his closest secretaries either means that he's really confident in security for the address, or that he's caught onto the murmurs of discontent about Ashcroft being the intended successor and is trying to compensate.
As expected, a large chunk of the initial part of the speech is militaristic in nature. Bush really likes the military, having made it one of his primary instruments of foreign policy, and crowed repeatedly about the "hundreds of thousands" of soldiers who were out conquering evil the world over. This is obviously a bit of spin, since the large majority of those soldiers are currently focused on Iraq, with an additional 11,000 pretending to pursue the Taliban in Afghanistan. The fact that the president launched into two wars, one poorly handled and one flagrantly unjustified, and has been making vague hints at others, doesn't sit well with me. A term in which multiple wars are fought kinda says "bad job" to me, at least in the foreign affairs department.
All in all, Bush's take on military affairs is rather simplistic, narrowed down to "they angered us and our unstoppable might smashed them, now things are good again." He also crowed a bit about speaking with the military in many and diverse places, including an aircraft carrier and a Baghdad mess hall, but neglects to mention that those are his only troop visits abroad. (On top of it, one was mangled by implying the Iraq war was over, and the other was carefully timed to overshadow Hillary Clinton's trip to Afghanistan about the same time.)
One of the most disturbing things about this part of the speech is Bush's utter disdain for the rule of law:
After the World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993, some of the guilty were indicted, tried, convicted, and sent to prison. But the matter was not settled. The terrorists were still training and plotting in other nations, and drawing up more ambitious plans.[3]After the chaos and carnage of September 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers...
Bush has been getting closer for some time to just admitting he has a carte-blanche for launching military strikes on whatever country he pleases. This is a big step in that direction. As well, this is a statement on Guantanamo Bay. Bush is basically saying that it's good that the prisoners from Afghanistan - these "enemy combatants" so carefully defined as to not have any rights at all - aren't seeing trial, because doing that would permit the terrorists to win. I suppose if they hate us for our freedoms...
Attempting to pontificate on Iraq and the Middle East for a bit after that, the president continues to display a spin-laden and simplistic view of the world. He basically says that WMD were found in Iraq, which is a neat trick considering they weren't, and snipes for awhile at the Security Council his administration is working so very hard to emasculate. He implies that Iraq is a "better and safer place" currently, which I suppose could be true relative to the height of the 1991 bombing campaign, but is otherwise being lumped under "Absolute Bullshit," along with Bush's tremendous Coalition of the Willing, most of whom offered little more than airspace to the current war, and many of whom only offered soldiers after Iraq's army routed after Baghdad fell.
Another of the things Bush does which troubles me in this area (and he says a lot of things which trouble me) is suffer from a common delusion of the West - namely, that it is even marginally possible to impose democracy on an undemocratic region in any timespan which can be counted in terms of administrations. The president accidentally said something correct when he said "[a]s long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny, despair, and anger, it will continue to produce [terrorists]." Conditions in the region are not conductive to happy people, and we should expect trouble out of the area for awhile. However, the tendency is to either miss or wilfully avoid understanding the broader contexts of the Middle Eastern problems. This generally involves knowing what was going on in the area back to the First World War, which is a bit daunting for the layman, but I'd expect the president of the most powerful country on Earth to at least have advisors who could explain it in terms more nuanced than "terrorists are in the Middle East because evil governments are." The idea of expanding Voice of America's broadcasts is noteworthy, and probably not a bad idea - I like seeing fighting with memes before guns and bombs - but American policy towards the Middle East in past generations has alienated the people too much for me to have faith in it working. As I said back in October, the process of democratizing the Middle East is way, way beyond the ability of any one man or nation, and that's a fact people are just going to have to deal with.
They won't, of course, but I can dream.
Bush's economic babbling is little more than that. I'm sure the president is at least marginally worried about the economy, considering it sent his father stumbling out of office after the previous war. So of course he's trying to paint a rosy picture of a country with no real economic issues to speak of since they recovered from September 11. Now, I'm not an economist, and lack the background to really analyze that. However, I have seen the Canadian dollar skyrocketing relative to the US dollar due to currency declines down south, unemployment is still high, and the deficit in the US is at its highest point in, well, ever. the BBC has a series of charts keeping an eye on things. Charts #2 and #4 are telling, and that's all I'll say about that.
Next is a brief spiel on education, which (as to be expected) focuses on how great the No Child Left Behind act is. NCLB, annoyingly, was one of Bush's better-named bills - better-named meaning "named so that it would be suicide to oppose it," and one of the reasons I think people should just refer to the damn things by numbers. "Some want to undermine the [NCLB Act] by weakening standards and accountability," Bush claims, as though there is some force out there saying, "let's destroy education!" However, the accountability to which the president refers consists of little more than stripping funding from underperforming schools. Now, I don't know about you, but where I come from that's actually guaranteeing worse performance in the future. He provides some more words on his plans, such as improving financial aid for AP students and improving community colleges, but these could simply be more smoke and mirrors.
Ever since the president (who, I am ashamed to know, holds a history degree) declared Jesus to be his favorite political philosopher, he's kept on a slow slide into an anti-education bias similar to what the Tories are doing in many Canadian provinces. The fact that President Bush's academic records are stored under lock and key to this day doesn't speak well for the man's intelligence, much less his respect for the educational system. The United States has traditionally had an amazing higher-education program, with colleges that easily rank among the best in the world. The K-12 system, however, is probably one of the worst in the developed world, and beyond counterproductive legislation with cute names, President Bush has not lifted a finger to help it.
After similar platitudes on health and taxation, the president wandered into his moralizing territory, one of those things he's actually good at ranting about. Although he can talk at length about it, he again doesn't actually say much of anything beyond saying he'll propose additional money to tell kids that drugs are bad - you know, just in case they don't generally know that cocaine messes you up, that sorta thing. He also tells professional athletes to stop using steroids, which is another "..well, duh" kind of thing.
In the wake of that, he segues right into other puritanical things, particularly his homophobic stance. The president continues to swing around the idea that gay marriage somehow violates the rights of heterosexuals, and talks about judicial activism in the sense of evil judges writing their own laws for the people, rather than sticking to the 1790's-era constitution word for word.[4] Bush makes the standard appeal to antiquity about the issue - ignoring the fact that slavery and social misogynism are even more entrenched than late-classical morality and, without even coming out and mentioning them by name, urges a constitutional amendment to roll back gay rights, all the while talking in a matter which points to his wanting to have church-state seperations taken out back and shot. While I can see that religious organizations should be allowed to engage in social service with a bit more ease - belief is an important thing to me, even though I want that wall to stay up - there is a concern about charitable actions being offered with a bit of manditory proselytizing or whatnot on top of it. That ain't cool in some situations, and I think it somewhat wrong to go to the point of creating federal departments to begin trying to give primacy back to religious organizations. Bush holds on to the old siege mentality that the believers are a suppressed minority in an atheistic (and therefore evil!) society, which is another one of those Totally False things that I'm gonna write about sometime in the future when I want to make some enemies.
After concluding with some standard cutesy commentary from a children's letter and issuing the standard "whatever we do is the best thing for all" spiel that seems to end most of his speeches, the president mercifully comes to an end.
I will note that there was no mention whatsoever of Osama bin Laden (and only three mentions of al-Qaeda) in this speech. I will also note that there is no mention of the space initiative the president announced last week. As the Fourth Man quoted from another blog, I feel trifled with. The first of these is a Really Important Thing that Bush declared to be the nation's #1 priority since before the fires burned out in New York; his failure to accomplish anything here has been used little by the opposition, but much whitewashing has been done by the political right to try and convince people to stop remembering Osama's still out there. The second of these, I would like to think, is another Big And Important Thing that Bush claims to have committed the nation to, but he seems to have already forgotten about it amidst public apathy. This says two things: one, the space advocacy community in the United States right now really, really sucks, and two, the White House has little to no intent of actually implementing this plan.
One of my regrets at not catching the State of the Union live is the fact that I couldn't hear the audience reactions, namely the applause. Although Bush's speeches have become increasingly sycophantic over the years, to the point where they're currently mainly applause with a few sentences interspersed, the clapping during the Address can say something about levels of popular support. One event that sticks out is Bush's mention of the Patriot Act. When he says the Act, vile unconstitutional menace that it is, is set to expire soon, people in the Democratic half of the chamber burst into applause. The Democratic party is usually pretty spineless as of late, but this was a burst of defiance that's pretty unprecedented.
This more than anything tells me about the state of the Union. The current state of the Union is polarized, possibly moreso than it has been at any point in years. If anything can be said for President Bush, it's the fact that he got people interested in what's going on in the United States. This polarization is both good and bad. It's good because we're finally starting to see some opposition to the political right in the US, something which hasn't been around since Clinton's second term in office. It implies a greater awareness of some of the bungles, spin, and outright menacing actions of the Republican party, which has moved significantly to the right since 2000 (and that's saying something). On the other hand, this polarization is also bad. There's a risk of seeing another sort of culture war breaking out in the US, as the two wings of American society become entrenched and increasingly hostile.
Opposition is a very good - indeed, a necessary - thing in representative systems, as long as it is done intelligently. However, the more vocal wings of each spectrum, both left and right, are turning into a rather dogmatic mess which is more apt to fling mud than debate, reform, or accomplish anything. President Bush has done little good and much harm to the United States so far, and I'm afraid that he's run in the year 2004 leaving America a nation of broken promise, and the White House an institution of broken promises. It is more important than ever to get this joker out of office before he manages to garner himself a second term, and political moderates and liberals need to start acting now so that they can try to reclaim the United States to begin repairing the damage.
That's my $0.314159265 for the time being. Expect - and nag me for - the other articles I alluded to here over the next few days. Some other ideas are also spinning around. As always, comments and suggestions are manditory!
1 - Despite the obvious stupidity of it, I expected Ridge first, since his new post was placed rather high up the succession list. There is a definate conflict of interest about the whole affair, though. Can you imagine the guy who failed to protect the government from being wiped out to a man being placed in charge of the ashes? You can't? Lucky.
2 - Traditionally the Minister of Finance gets such tremendous flak for any blips during his executive's term that it ends his political career; the current Prime Minister is a rare exception. Getting the Finance portfolio is basically a death sentence that supernatural ability can, but rarely will, avoid. Health is a close second.
3 - The Republicans roundly condemned President Clinton's missile strikes on Afghanistan and the Sudan as trying to distract from domestic concerns, as they did every other military action under his administration. These same officials are also at times explicitly stating that people should not be allowed to criticise President Bush for doing the same thing today...
4 - I've got an article on constitutional puritanism in the works.
Posted by zibblsnrt at January 21, 2004 07:15 PM