LA Weekly/Harold Meyerson on SOTU: "Is That All There Is?"

[cosmicdot]

Is That All There Is? - Bush runs out of policy and hews to a narrow political attack

1 hour, 55 minutes ago Add Local - Los Angeles Weekly to My Yahoo!


By Harold Meyerson LA Weekly Writer

~snip~

Has there ever been a State of the Union with fewer initiatives, policies or ideas? Bushs speech was almost entirely a defense of his greatest hits, such as they are. It was clearly designed to showcase the presidents resolve and contrast it with Howard Deans weaknesses. Not by name, of course: Bush disparaged the views of an unspecified but clearly identifiable some. Some thought that terrorism should be treated as a criminal act, not an act of war, that the Patriot Act could be dispensed with, that the threat of terrorism had even been lifted.

The White House had not scheduled this speech for the day after the Iowa caucuses for nothing. Clearly, Dean was supposed to have emerged on Monday as the Democrats prohibitive front-runner. Clearly, the address was meant to provide one long contrast between Bushs assumed vigilance and Deans presumed fecklessness.

But if we know anything about Bush, its that he's not a president for last-minute revisions, much less, God save us, improvisation. If the speech was intended as an attack on Dean, well, the president would just go ahead and deliver it even though Dean is now anything but the Democrats prohibitive front-runner. Oh, the themes Bush invoked could be broad-brushed onto the Democrats as a whole, but all that innuendo that Karl Rove had so painstakingly planted would just have to strike with distinctly less force.

As for the rest — what was the rest? It was a defensive speech in content and tone. The president had not been wrong about the weapons of mass destruction; conceptually, at least, they were still out there. His tax cuts had turned the economy around. (Their failure to have generated any significant number of new jobs, of course, went unsurprisingly unnoted.) Tax cuts for investment were again hailed as the surest path to recovery, even though the objects of those investments — American corporations — have decided to do their hiring abroad.

~snip~

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/vv/20040124/lo_laweekly/50476

Rated this one a *5*

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. I love the way he builds to this paragraph:

"Bush extolled the troglodytic and plutocratic crap that Congress has enacted over the past three years. He lobbied for Congress to renew or make permanent those troglodytic and plutocratic programs, such as the Patriot Act and the tax cuts on the rich. He returned to the case for the troglodytic and plutocratic crap that Congress has somehow neglected to enact, such as privatizing Social Security and placing restrictions on lawsuits against business."