Bush’s state of delusion: speech to Congress ignores crises at home and...

[IndianaGreen]

Bush’s state of delusion: speech to Congress ignores crises at home and abroad
By Editorial Board
3 February 2005

The State of the Union speech is a ritual of American politics, but it has been increasingly characterized by an air of unreality.

Given the enormous social distance between the politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties and the masses of working people, it is difficult to sustain the pretense that the president is fulfilling a constitutional responsibility to report to the populace, through Congress, on the state of the country. The annual address has become, instead, a combination of media event—whose audience has steadily declined—and backslapping get-together for the Washington political elite.

Even in that context, the speech delivered by George W. Bush on Wednesday night set a new standard for platitudes, generalities and a refusal to address concretely any significant social or economic problem. Neither on domestic issues nor foreign affairs would Bush spell out specific policies for the coming year. For all his religion-tinged homilies about the glories of freedom and democracy, his administration increasingly acts as a power unto itself, rejecting even the slightest political accountability for its actions.

Accordingly, Bush refused to set any limits to the US occupation of Iraq, and failed to provide any details of his plan to radically alter Social Security by introducing private investment accounts.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/sotu-f03.shtml