Last night, President Barack Obama delivered his third State of the Union Address. What was novel about this one is that members of congress decided to mix it up a little and mix up the parties rather then sitting one party to a side of the hall as has been done for much of the event's history.
In a typical SOTU (State of the Union) one side or the other of the hall would stand and applaud, usually in a totally partisan or cynical fashion, several times during the speech and it had just gotten silly. Let me say that I think the whole thing is silly any way. The address gives the President an opportunity to lay out a path for legislation in the coming year but little of what gets laid out is ever accomplished.
Much of the purpose for mixing up the audience this year was in reaction to South Carolina's Representative, Joe Wilson, with his famous "You lie!" outburst during the 2009 SOTU and with the Democrats trying to make things more palatable after the huge losses of 2010.
President Obama was concerned to a fault with keeping promises of compromise with Republicans in the first two years of his presidency and, now, it's a legislative imperative. Thus, we got the political theater of Republicans and Democrats, in a Kumbaya moment, cats and dogs laying together. Surely the sign of a new era of cooperation. We all know it's pure show though. We know the routine. We'll get promises of cooperation, collaboration, and compromise and, not a week later, all that will be over.
So, knowing it's all a bunch of crap, I watch as a rubber-necker, like I'm watching for the car crash. The event I usually look forward to is the response from the other party. The Republicans have been amazing at this in the past years. In 2009 we got Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in his now famously Mr. Rogers as android response that basically killed his political career nationally. This year we got new Republican wunderkind Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan's response was a dry reading of economic figures delivered like he had a gun to his head off camera. It didn't clear any new path for Republicans trying to court independent voters in the run-up to 2012 and it didn't do anything to further Ryan's political ambitions.
What was seriously funny this year is that the Tea Party put up lunatic Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann to offer a further response to the SOTU. In all honesty, this is the moment I had waited for the whole night but I was watching on MSNBC and they didn't carry it live. What a shame! Bachmann is a religious zealot who usually has that kind of glassy-eyed cultist look going on and it only got better when she was looking into the Tea Party camera, not the pool camera that was carrying the actual feed. So, it looked like she was talking off into space.
Bachmann had said, famously, earlier this week, "We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." She honestly stated that the founding fathers of the United States abolished slavery. I don't know if she just misspoke or if the gist of what she was saying wasn't properly conveyed but, I suspect, she's as much if not more of an idiot than Sarah Palin. Bachmann got her degree in tax law from Oral Roberts University so ...... Maybe they didn't cover that history stuff in her tax classes.
But this is why I crave so much the potential of Bachmann or Palin to really get into the race for president in 2012. It's like George W. magnified. Palin and Bachmann both come off as ultra-conservative housewives from the 1960s when women couldn't worry their little heads about those heavy political matters men had to deal with and got all they needed to know about politics when hubby came home from work and they talked over dinner. They don't really know what's going on and they get all of their "information" from sources like Glenn Beck, the Drudge Report, and Newsmax if they actually bother to keep up with the news at all. So I can only imagine the fun if these women were to actually have to engage in debates. Further, what if one of them actually became president? Putting their glaring lack of understanding of real-world political matters under the spotlight for four years would be, in my estimation, a wonderful tonic for this country.
Now, Glenn Beck, there's a different story. I'm not sure if he's actually crazy or just a huckster taking advantage of people like my father and my in-laws who want to believe that Obama is the Devil. He pulled out the real chestnut of the evening. He identified that Obama would be addressing five pillars in the SOTU. So, what's the big deal? Five areas of focus in a speech isn't unusual. But he didn't say "areas of focus"; he said "pillars". That's right; five pillars.
As anybody with any knowledge of Islam knows, the Five Pillars of Faith are central to that religion's philosophy. As anybody who likes Glenn Beck knows, President Obama is secretly Muslim. Well, in public at least, but they all know that he's open about it around his inner circle of socialist muhajidin as they work to destroy the paradise devised by our founding fathers.
So Glenn Beck nailed him, right? Well, actually the word pillar was not used in the speech. Neither was the word five. But what if the word five had been used? Couldn't that also refer to the five points of the inverted pentagram used by Satanists in their socialistic rituals? Beck suggested that Obama was just rubbing our faces in it. That Obama was just daring us to call out the obvious Muslim propaganda begin foisted upon us. It just so freaks me out that people take this idiot seriously.
Then there was Georgia representative Paul Broun who is actually a medical doctor just to illustrate one problem with the level of health care out there these days. To bring you up to date on Paul Broun, here are some of his zingers on Obama from the past few years:
"We can't be lulled into complacency. You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential of going down that road."
"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."
And Broun on the Centers for Disease Control:
“Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said people in America are not eating enough fruits and vegetables. They want all the power of the federal government to force you to eat more fruits and vegetables. This is what the federal CDC– They (sic) going to be calling people and finding out how many fruits and vegetables you eat (sic) today. This is socialism of the highest order!"
So Paul Broun didn't even attend the SOTU last night. Rather, he sat in his office putting out the following on Twitter:
All children will be poor if we continue with Obama's policies #fb #SOTU #TCOT
Obama's policies kill free-enterprise #fb #SOTU #TCOT
Mr. President, you don't believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism.
Well ..... there's your daily feed from the lunatic fringe. I would hope that these people are just making political hay to further their political careers in parts of the country where the majority of voters don't know any better but I honestly think, well, with the exception of Beck, that these people believe what they say. I think these people get their information from sources like Beck and Newsmax and never bother to question what they hear and read. I don't feel comfortable calling people so intellectually un-curious anything less than idiots. As harmful as it is though, I still find it funny.
People like Beck, Bachmann, Palin, Broun, et al, take the political discourse to places of no relevance whatsoever and distract us and the media from legitimate concerns. But it's just too damned funny. I know I'm just rubber-necking. It's the political version of watching nut shots on those home video shows. The only problem is that it's like watching our country get hit in the nuts.
For a really good read on political distraction of this type, I highly recommend Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas".
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