The Speech

Doing this without reading anyone or listening to the talking pinheads, so here we go, unvarnished...

As far as Obama speeches go it was a home run onto Waveland Ave. Nobody does speech like this man. At one point near the end a pin could be heard to drop, which is a feat in that place. We haven't heard rhetoric as sharp or cunning since the campaign. His base will be ecstatic, the congressional Dems renewed, and the GOP re-flustered. At least for awhile.

Trouble is, in between the speeches the real world has seen a slow motion disaster that just words can't fix.

He did not say the state of the union was strong, or anything, at least not that I heard. Maybe a good idea. The tea partiers and the Scott Browns got him to mention a capital gains tax cut and to brag that income taxes had not risen a penny (bravo) this past year, and even to admit that it's business, not government, that creates jobs.

But then he lauded the Stimulus Bill as a raging success; lobbied for the current health care bill; lectured about a cap and trade bill; suggested gays in the military; said nobody was demonized then hammered the banks and proposed a punitive tax on them, even after they've repaid TARP; demonized the Supreme Court decision on campaign finances; and recommended free student loans or something.

IOW, classic mommy party stuff, flowery fluff and marshmallows, the stuff that pipe dreams are made of. There was no getting tough on pulling down the deficit and not much of anything from a discipline standpoint. But that's daddy party stuff.

He wrapped by making it clear he would take on those obstructionists using the sluggish and cumbersome constitutional process to frustrate his change, oh, and the terrorists too. And he'll never quit, not fighting AQ, but until progress starts occurring at the same pace as it does in dictatorships like communist China and parliamentary Germany. All in all, a great speech--mainly about him.

I GUESS THIS IS CHANGE 1/27/10

When the President of the United States verbally smacks down a Supreme Court decision with the justices sitting 20 feet away. Part of the never-ending quest to defeat the conservative enemy..



MY BAD 1/28/10

Looking at the transcript he did say the union was strong. It was more or less buried in a paragraph about the country in general therefore it didn't really stand out like former SOTU messages, so I missed it. Most of the time this kind of statement ends a sentence, but Barack doesn't do black and white.