State Of The Union Is Meaningless

Yesterday was the State of the Union and I’ll be honest, I fell asleep in the middle. So I didn’t hear the second half of it. What I did hear Obama’s support of science. That’s great, but if you recall, President Bush also praised science in one of his SOTU addresses.

As it turns out, the President says a lot of things during the State of the Union, but most of them he has no intention on actually acting upon. These speeches are just theater. Sure, Obama said that he will start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, but he should have started doing that the moment Bin Laden was dead… if not before. He didn’t need to wait until his “big speech” to actually inform the public about something presidential. Besides, talk is cheap.

So what the hell is the point of these things? Apparently, the state of our union is getting stronger. Don’t they always say that? I mean when was the last time the president (any president) said that the state of our union sucks. That would be actual honesty and politicians are pretty much incapable of that.

The economy still sucks, we still don’t have a first world health care system, and education in this country has been dumbed down so much that we actually have a congressman on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology who doesn’t believe in science. The fact is that America is lagging behind the rest of the world and the President isn’t doing squat about it. Instead, he is taking photos of himself skeet shooting and ordering double-tap drone strikes into nations we are not at war with.

Then there is that little matter of him giving himself the power to execute US citizens without a trial if they happen to be out of the nation, perhaps on vacation. He says he only does that to bad guys, but without a trial it is just his opinion. If Obama is doing this, how do you think the next Republican president will interpret it? Do you really think a Republican president would say, “Obama was wrong to kill US citizens overseas with drone strikes, I promise never to do that.” Of course not; the Republicans will say, “See, Obama was allowed to kill anyone he claimed was a bad guy, so we can too… oh, and all liberals are bad guys. That’s what Rush told me anyway.”

Look, if the President had to commit to his State of the Union promises, then I would care much more about what he had to say during the big speech. But as it is now, he just uses this speech to make himself look more liberal than he actually is. He talks a good game, but doesn’t follow through.