The State of the Union address

What I really wanted to bring you this morning is the picture of Nancy Pelosi sitting in the chair of the Speaker of the House during President Bush's State of the Union address. You want to know something funny? The White House website has photoshopped both Cheney and Pelosi out of the picture and shows just Bush in front of the huge American flag. Or else they've used a picture of a different occasion. They just couldn't stand to have Pelosi in the picture, could they? (Well denial is not just a river in Egypt.)

Here's a CNN QuickVote that may interest you:

What was your overall impression of the president's State of the Union address?

Positive - 37%

Negative - 63%

Now I'd like to share with you an excerpt from an article entitled "28% and Counting, the Disintegration of a President" by Anthony Wade. It's a good summary from a progressive point of view of what Bush said. Here's what Wade has to say about the part of the speech on the economy:

Moving quickly, the president then entered fantasy land to discuss the economy. It is important to understand that the only thing that George Bush has ever supported economically is business and the super-rich. The Holy Grail of this president's economic vision is his extremely unfair and slanted tax cuts. His goal when he came into office was to roll taxes back, with 95% of the money going to the top 1% of the rich in this country. Not you or I, just the rich. A spade is a spade, and I am tried of people crying "class warfare" while they are waging warfare on the middle class and working poor. Make no mistake about it America; George Bush's primary domestic imperative is to keep the tax cuts for the rich permanent. In order to do this, he must pretend that these tax cuts have spurred the economy. In order for that fairy tale to be true, he needs to pretend that the economy is somehow doing well, when it clearly is not. I have heard all about the fake statistics and the irrelevant stock market. The average person on the street knows full well that that there are two economies. The one for the rich is doing very well; hence the stock market increases. The one for the average American though, is failing them every day. The jobs acquired today are worse than the ones we had ten years ago. Healthcare is not affordable. Gas prices are still unacceptable. College tuition is out of reach. These are the realities facing Americans each and every day but all George Bush can do is pretend they do not exist. He is forced to pretend that "uninterrupted job growth" demands that the rich get richer, even though he cannot create enough jobs to keep up with the new job seekers. In closing on the economy, Bush offered two other proposals that were so funny I had to laugh. One was to balance the budget, even though he never has and the second one was to eliminate earmarks, even though he never vetoed one GOP spending bill in his presidency. The smell of hypocrisy was pungent in the air, as Congresspersons winked and nodded.

Click through and read the whole article - particularly if you couldn't bear to listen to the speech as it was being delivered.