BUSH: GIVE PEACE WAR A CHANCE

Before the speech, instead of dissecting cookie recipes, CNN was wasting airtime with seating charts and a warning that if the roof caved in and everyone died we'd be stuck with Albert "The Torturer" Gonzalez as president. Today that same sad mentality shows us a mass media more concerned with making a fuss about Bush calling the Democratic majority the "Democrat majority" than with exposing the lies and distortions that were the essence of his manipulative and dishonest speech. At least the Washington Post seems to have noticed that Bush's portrayal of "the enemy" was flawed.

"In his State of the Union address last night, President Bush presented an arguably misleading and often flawed description of "the enemy" that the United States faces overseas, lumping together disparate groups with opposing ideologies to suggest that they have a single-minded focus in attacking the United States. Under Bush's rubric, a country such as Iran-- which enjoys diplomatic representation and billions of dollars in trade with major European countries-- is lumped together with al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. 'The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat,' Bush said, referring to the different branches of the Muslim religion... In fact, many of the countries that Bush considers 'moderate'-- such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia-- are autocratic dictatorships rated among the worst of the "not free" nations by the nonpartisan Freedom House. Their Freedom House ratings are virtually indistinguishable from Cuba, Belarus and Burma, which Bush last night listed as nations in desperate need of freedom."

Jim Webb did a great job in showing Americans the difference between a 2 bit hack like Bush a thoughtful and patriotic statesman. "For the first time ever, the response to the State of the Union Message overshadowed the president's big speech. Virginia Sen. James Webb, in office only three weeks, managed to convey a muscular liberalism—with personal touches—that left President Bush's ordinary address in the dust."

And while a doddering and senile old fool like McCain snoozed through Bush's strained and formalistic ramblings, "dozens of Republican leaders," according to ABC News, "joined Democrats in taking aim at President Bush's State of the Union address Tuesday night... Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter both attacked the president's plan for a troop buildup... The speech didn't sway Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who said that he remains opposed to the troop increase. 'It hasn't changed by mind,' Brownback said. 'I think we have to have a bipartisan buy-in on the war in Iraq.' And Virginia Republican John Warner, a powerful member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who opposes the surge but is against Hagel's nonbinding resolution, was more complimentary of Democratic Sen. Jim Webb's response than he was of Bush's speech."


Most telling of all is that the only politicians willing to swallow the entire pack of crap whole were the 2 discredited senators pushing Bush to escalate the war even more than he wants to: John McCain, who, as I pointed out, slept through most of the speech (but had his talking points memorized beforehand) and Holy Joe Lieberman, Washington's most toxic voice, who ran around looking for news reporters to spin after the speech.

DMI issued a report that analyzed what the ideas and proposals behind Bush's speech would mean for the middle class.

When it came to health care, the President opted to push an aggressive ideological agenda on the backs of middle-class Americans, offering “market-based” proposals that treat health care as if it were any other commodity and fail to address the real reasons behind its ballooning costs. On the economy, the President wants to reduce the deficit while maintaining his tax cuts that favor the very wealthy.
 
On issues like education and energy, the President’s proposals lacked a core vision or an admission that previous years of inaction and underfunding have made these problems far more intractable today than they had to be.
 
Listening to the speech, average Americans heard the President use those words that the droves of Americans who abandoned him and his party at the polls two months earlier wanted to hear.  He spoke of improving access to health care and of providing a system of public education that would “leave no child behind.”  He told us he would balance our federal budget.  He promised to reduce America’s dependence on oil, to improve our environment, to secure the border and to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  He looked Americans in the eye and told them our economy was good and their lives were getting better.