Depending on your party affiliation, the State of the Union speech is either a highpoint of American political life or a sick joke. I’m not looking forward to W’s rendition tonight, and I’m ninety-five percent sure that I won’t bother watching.
Bush will tell us that the Iraq Occupation is going just great, thank you; that the air and water are cleaner in America than ever, the trees and wildlife flourishing; that the massive tax cuts for the wealthy are spurring an economic recovery that is the envy of the civilized world; that his Medicare drug plan is the best thing to happen to our senior citizens in at least half a century; that the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast is proceeding according to plan; and finally, that we are safer because the government is keeping watch on the bad guys in our ranks.
Morning in America, all’s well, if you don’t believe it just ask Karl Rove.
Bush will spin like a top, and if that means calling white black and black white, well, who’s keeping score? What is truth but spin, and who spins better than the Conservative machine? Bill O and Rush L, and all the rest of the blowhards will echo the president’s assertions across the land, lending credence to the exaggerations and outright falsehoods, but like I said, who’s keeping track except a few powerless Liberals out on the fringes?
George Orwell, wherever he is, will not laugh tonight; Martin Luther King won’t either; Robert F. Kennedy will flop around with angst; Tom Paine will scream. A society that cannot tell truth from fiction is in trouble. A society that is so easily led around by its nose is doomed. A society that allows its laws to be trampled cannot long stand.
Osama bin Laden may chuckle tonight. Osama and perhaps Dick Cheney, sitting in different locations on this spinning planet, chuckling because doing what they do is so damn easy.
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