The New Yorker on SOTU Adress: UNSTEADY STATE

[BlueEyedSon]

The word “war,” on the other hand, makes a dozen appearances in the speech, while “terror” and its derivatives appear twenty times. The surrounding contexts suggest that Bush and his political handlers plan to use 9/11 and its aftermath every bit as ruthlessly this year as they did in 2002, when Republicans captured control of the Senate by portraying Democrats as friends of terrorism. (The most prominent victim of this strategy was Senator Max Cleland, of Georgia, who lost three limbs fighting in Vietnam, and who was defeated by ads showing his face alongside those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.) In 2004, according to Bush, “we face a choice: we can go forward with confidence and resolve, or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us.” If the choice he is talking about is November’s (and what else could it be?), then this is slander. The illusion that Bush describes is shared by none of the four remaining Democratic candidates with a chance at nomination. Nor, by the way, do any of them doubt that the Iraqi people are better off without the regime of Saddam Hussein. And, while all four are for other reasons critical of Bush’s Iraq policies, all recognize that, like it or not, the rehabilitation of Iraq is now an American responsibility.

<snip>

In last year’s State of the Union, Bush’s buzz phrase was “weapons of mass destruction,” the threat of which justified the impending conquest of Iraq. This year’s speech subsumed that phrase into the longer, mealier “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities,” a usefully adaptable locution. Were teams of inspectors to fan out across Bush’s domestic policies in search of solutions to the nation’s problems, they would be less likely to return empty-handed if they settle for environment-related program activities (such as logging in national forests), education-related program activities (such as requiring tests without providing the funds to help kids pass them), and health care-related program activities (such as forbidding Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices). Like the speech itself, all this comes under the heading of winning the election-related program activities. Here’s hoping it will prove equally effective.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040202ta_talk_hertzberg

[indepat]

1. Are the only things we have to fear are fear itself and those who

preach fear to mask their real agenda?

[Martin Eden]

2. I especially liked the last twp paragraphs:

Bush’s only serious (that is, expensive) domestic program, as always, is yet another mammoth tax entitlement for the rich and the superrich. The new plan would make permanent his earlier tax cuts, which, in a gimmick designed to make future deficits look less terrifying, were scheduled to expire in 2010. This new round of relief for the unneedy, like the previous three, is to be financed (though the President didn’t mention this part) by confiscating the Social Security “trust fund,” curtailing federal activities that benefit society at large, and borrowing more trillions—taking out a fourth mortgage on the future, payable to foreign creditors. The rest of Bush’s proposals were either ruinously expensive, socially poisonous non-starters (such as privatizing Social Security) or cheap cuts of wormy red meat for the conservative and evangelical base. Of the latter the cheapest was an exhortation to professional athletes to quit taking steroids, the wormiest a threat to deface the Constitution with anti-gay graffiti.

In last year’s State of the Union, Bush’s buzz phrase was “weapons of mass destruction,” the threat of which justified the impending conquest of Iraq. This year’s speech subsumed that phrase into the longer, mealier “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities,” a usefully adaptable locution. Were teams of inspectors to fan out across Bush’s domestic policies in search of solutions to the nation’s problems, they would be less likely to return empty-handed if they settle for environment-related program activities (such as logging in national forests), education-related program activities (such as requiring tests without providing the funds to help kids pass them), and health care-related program activities (such as forbidding Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices). Like the speech itself, all this comes under the heading of winning the election-related program activities. Here’s hoping it will prove equally effective.