State of the Union Address

The State of the Union address George Bush should have given...

My fellow Americans. I come to you with distressing news. The state of our Union is not good. Your government, under my direction, has utterly failed you in almost all areas.

You are being governed by a culture, not of life, but of corruption. That corruption, and a general lack of interest in policies we don't believe in, has led you to be less safe today because my administration has encouraged our enemies and alienated our allies.

And for many of you the future does not look promising. My party, the Republican Party, which has controlled all branches of government for the past few years, lacks the discipline to control spending without doing so on the backs of the poor. As a result we turned a budget surplus into long-term record deficits.

In addition, my fellow Republicans are in the middle of what many have called one of the biggest corruption scandals in many years. While I and others have dishonestly tried to say that Democrats were equally involved, in reality Democrats saw their contributions decline among the involved tribes once my fellow Republican Jack Abramoff got involved. Luckily for me that is a point the media has for the most part ignored.

Another area we have ignored has been Afghanistan. More than four years ago Osama Bin Laden organized an attack against this great country. Our reaction was to pursue a half-hearted commitment to finding him in Afghanistan and instead went after Saddam Hussein to finish what my father and his cronies would not.

Instead of pursuing a strategy to "Finish Afghanistan First," we needlessly involved ourselves in a war that might have been avoided. Our occupation has enraged people throughout the world and destroyed a once-in-a-lifetime reservoir of goodwill afforded to us after 9/11.

But we didn't forget 9/11. Domestically we turned 9/11 into a political opportunity, as a way to question the patriotism of those who dared to question us. In this area I can stand here tonight and say we were very successful. Through a dishonest and distasteful campaign I was able to get a tiny majority of voters to support me and my radical agenda.

Another election is only 10 months away and I can assure you that while we may forgotten, or never learned the lessons of 9/11, we will not forget how to use 9/11 to overcome our inherent weaknesses.

You see if votes were counted accurately and completely in 2000 I would have never been President. It was only through the efforts of members of my party and justices on the Supreme Court that we were able to overcome the will of the people.

Tonight I am pleased to say we have another soldier to help us in future battles with the approval of Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. I can't tell you how good it made me feel to hear his views opposing the one-man, one-vote principle.

For those of you who believe our callous, dishonest and uncaring actions will hurt us in November, remember we have spent the last decade working to ensure that elections turn out in our favor.

Even though our reaction to Katrina, our bungling of the budget surplus, our damaging of the environment and any number of other failures might enrage voters, until talk radio raises these subjects we won't have to worry.

We don't care because we don't have to. Thank you.

New Feature - Really Bad Cartoons

If no-talent partisan conservatives can get their inaccurate and questionable cartoons run by the main stream media, why can't a no talent liberal get the the same treatment. In a new feature, Really Bad Cartoons will follow the lead of the right, except be truthful.

They Just Don't Get It

It took a near riot by disgruntled readers of the Washington Post but Deborah Howell, the Post's Ombudsman, finally admitted she made a mistake in saying that Jack Abramoff contributed to both parties. Unfortunately apparently neither she nor the paper understood why it took a near riot for the newspaper to respond.

Instead the Post should have seen this coming. Howell had made a series of errors and questionable statements in previous columns, raising readers hackles, but when readers complained to anyone at the Post who would listen, they were told they should give her a chance.

The problems started in December when she criticized Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing column, calling it highly opinionated and liberal. The resulting tussle was played out on media blogs but Hit-and-Run Howell never addressed it again.

Next up she apparently didn't like, or responded to conservative critics of a Post story that the poor were overly reprented in the military because of a lack of other economic opportunties. In The Whole Story on Military Recruiting she accepted the Pentagon's and Rand Corp claim that the data in the story, part of which supplied by the National Priorities Project, was based on only 20 counties and so 'the data are clearly not representative.' The NPP said "Ms. Howell was told repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that the people she spoke with were wrong, that the NPP analysis was based on the entire population of recruits, not just a sample."

Next up on Howell's Hit Parade was A Few New Year's Resolutions, where she said "The liberals seem to expect The Post to be the house organ of Moveon.org." This is a standard conservative talking point, more fully examined previously.

To date, the only error she has addmited was her comment in Getting the Story on Abramoff that Abramoff "had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties."

But she didn't take back her statement that Post articles had said "that a number of Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (N.D.), have gotten Abramoff campaign money."

Apparently she could admit to one mistake. But the bigger mistake was hers and Post missing the point the bigger point, that as Bloomberg pointed out, that Abramoff's tribal clients gave money to Democrats after he began representing them, but in smaller percentages than in the past.

So, shouldn't the story have been "Abramoff helped cut tribal donations to Democrats."

Worst American President

Watching the current administration in action is similar to sitting at an intersection watching an impending car crash. You see it coming, you know it's going to happen but there is nothing you can do but watch.

Occasionally someone raises up and says "can't we stop this thing" or "this person should lose their license." Unfortunately it doesn't happen much. In politics that event happened the other day when New York Sen. Hillary Clinton pointed out that the Bush administration will go down as "one of the worst" in U.S. history.

One only has to look at Bush's accomplishments: turning a surplus into a deficit, turning the world against the U.S. (no easy task when after September 11 even the French said we are all Americans), and helped game the electoral system.

However what most people will hear about the speech is that Sen. Clinton said Republican leaders have run the House "like a plantation. " Of course those on the Right were appalled and immediately criticized Clinton, conveniently forgetting that in 1994 former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich, shortly before Republicans won a majority in the House, said Democrats "think it's their job to run the plantation" and that "it shocks them that I'm actually willing to lead the slave rebellion."

But hypocrisy is nothing new for those on the right. On Tuesday, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan called Al Gore (winner of the 2000 Presidential election) a hypocrite because Gore said that Bush broke the law by letting the National Security Agency monitor e-mails and phone calls to and from the United States without approval from a special federal court.

McClellan claimed the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, but what he didn't say was that at the searches in 1993 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

See if McClellan had told the truth, he couldn't have called Gore a hypocrite. And knowing that the press would most likely bury the technical aspects (i.e. facts) of the story, this left him free to lie with little reaction.

All in a day's work for staff of the Worst American President.

GOP: Don't Worry Be Happy

With all the talk about the current Republican scandals, a continual series of books by former adminstration officials who served in Iraq complaining about how the administration didn't know what it was doing, one might think that the GOP would be worried about the upcoming election.

Apparently not. According to blog reports, a number of right wing bloggers met with RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman and party strategists earlier this month and message they passed on was that there was no need to worry, that conservative's efforts to prevent the public from voting them out of office, no matter how bad they acted, has been successful. Basically, the system has been rigged.

Oh of course they didn't say that in so many words. Apparently they couched it in terms that in comparison to 1994 when the GOP took over Congress, this year there are a limited number of GOP retirements expected; there are almost no districts to be contested that were decided by less than 5% in 2004; and there are few districts that went for Kerry but voted for a GOP representative.

So despite news reports that Americans are leaning sharply toward wanting Democrats to take control of Congress those Americans will have to settle for continued Republican rule. This should come as no surprise. In 2000 the GOP figured out to lose the presidential election but gain the White House. In 2008 they are working on getting fewer votes but retaining the House of Representatives.

So apparently the word to the GOPers worried about losing power because of excesses and corruption: Don't Worry, Be Happy.

Washington Typists

One of the criticisms of the Mainstream Media (MSM) is that too often it eagerly serves as a foil for conservatives, pretending to debate their talking points but instead ending up in a role similar to that of the Washington Generals vs the Harlem Globetrotters.

In their role, members of the MSM (or perhaps the Washington Typists) discuss or disseminate talking points developed by conservatives, bringing them onto the national stage and giving them legitimacy, but never challenging them enough to show their fallacies.

A potential new member of the Typists may be Deborah Howell, the new ombudsman of the Washington Post, who on Sunday attempted to show Post is fair because both conservatives and liberals have problems with the Post, saying conservatives forget the Post was tough on Clinton and The liberals seem to expect The Post to be the house organ of Moveon.org.

(Note to Howell, no, conservatives have not forgot the Post's questionable coverage of Clinton, they just expect the media NOT to investigate Bush with the same gusto they went after Clinton.)

The problem with Howell's cheap shot about Moveon.org is that it is merely a repetition of a conservative talking point that liberals want a third party, such as Moveon.org to direct the news decisions of the media.

No, what liberals want is for the media to do their jobs. Liberals want media coverage to be accurate and complete but get upset when it is incomplete, inaccurate or pointedly conservative. Conservatives, on the other hand, EXPECT media coverage to support conservative views and are upset when it does not. If you have any doubt of this, consider the supposed media of choice for conservatives (FOX News) and liberals (NPR) and which is more accurate.

And while Ms. Howell thought she was disparaging liberals, the sad thing is that Moveon.org is now working to help the media with a campaign to reverse the Tribune Company's staff cuts at some of their papers (i.e. help keep more journalist reporting).

A few members of the media do go against the grain and outline problems liberals have identified, such as John Harris of the Washington Post saying in 2001 that Bush was getting break from the media, to Mark Halperin of ABC News in 2004 and Ken Silverstein of the Los Angeles Times saying the media attempts of an artificial balance of coverage of the two parties was poor reporting because balance isn't always fair.

So while the appointed media protectors may question the motives of liberals regarding the type of journalism they would like to see, what the protectors don't understand is that while they are ridiculing liberals about their views of the media, their own coworkers are providing ammunition to refute their arguments. So while the Howell's of the world are calling us crazy, their co-workers are saying 'maybe so but that doesn't mean they are wrong."

Gaming the election system

It should come as no surprise that a judge nominated by George W. Bush to the U.S. Supreme Court may hold views that question a fundamental principle of democracy in America today - one man, one vote.

As reported in the Washington Post, in 1985, when Samuel Alito Jr. was applying for a political appointment in the Reagan administration, he wrote that he disagreed with decisions by the Warren Court in the 1960s involving "reapportionment." Those rulings required electoral districts to have equal populations and helped ensure greater representation of urban minorities.

Previous to the 1962 Baker vs. Carr case, some states either didn't reapportion or did it by geography, resulting in disparities in representation. A column in the New York Times pointed out that prior to the ruling at the time, legislative districts had wildly unequal numbers of people, and representatives from underpopulated rural districts controlled many state legislatures. In Maryland, 14 percent of the voters could elect a majority of the State Senate, and 25 percent could elect a majority of the State House.

While pinheads at the Wall Street Journal snidely criticize people like Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware for questioning Alito's view while representing a state that has the same representation as California in the Senate. Apparently the Journal forgot that the Senate was set up that way and that the House of Representatives was supposed to be the house of the people.

To mollify Democrats, Alito apparently has put out the word that he now views one man one vote as a bedrock principle. Great, he may not believe in it, but he accepts it, for now.

The potential bigger historical issue is if Alito is claiming he just wrote what he wrote in 1985 because he was trying to get a job in the Reagan justice Department. So what does that say about the Reagan Justice Department? That they were a bunch of crackpots and that applicants had to spout the crackpot company line to get hired?

Apparently Alito's defense may be that was just trying to impress the crazies at Justice and so today he is saying "hey, I wasn't that crazy." What a comfort. In reality, once confirmed Alito will have the opportunity to do whatever he wishes, which, like Bush vs. Gore, may come back to haunt America.