the newyorker's take on the SOTU

[rusty charly]

George W. Bush says he wants to go to Mars—a motion that many of his fellow-citizen would heartily second—but he probabl doesn’t mean it. The speech in which h announced his “New Vision for Spac Exploration” was exceedingly vague abou how and when the trip was to be made. It di say that in 2015 or maybe in 2020 American would be going back to the moon, where the would build a base for “human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond.” An officia likened this speech to President Kennedy’ address of May 25, 1961, in which he asked the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.


A week later came Bush’s State of the Union address, the text of which one scans in vain for any mention of Mars, the moon, or space exploration. The subject has already been dropped.

-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