POTUS & SOTU

The State of the Union address last night was a lot of pretty words. Obama got his biggest reaction when he went off-script, and talked about winning two elections. I realize these things are vetted six ways to Sunday, but just once I'd like to see a "Ross Perot moment" where the president says what we're all thinking, fuck the script. It seems to me -- political naïf that I am -- that the American people would welcome some plain talking and "telling it like it is."

For instance, calling out Congress for being the least productive Congress in history -- then introducing as the first bill of the new session a Keystone XL authorization which benefits the Koch brothers and about 45 permanent job holders, but nobody else. You want the 4,000 construction jobs that go with it? How about funding roads and bridge repairs, dickheads.

Obama's remarks about the country's recovery in the past six years were a good start, but how about bringing up the excesses and lack of regulation under Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush that got us into this mess?

When he talked about ending torture and closing Gitmo, I yelled at the TV "When are you going to put Dick Cheney on trial?" We lost the high moral ground and have no standing against terrorists unless we follow our own laws.

How about calling out SCOTUS -- sitting stone faced in the front row, fuck move them to the hallway -- for their Koch-purchased rulings on campaign finance? At least three members of the court have serious and public conflicts of interest in the matter.

I flipped over to Fox after the speech -- the MSNBC analysis was entirely predictable -- to see how they'd spin the challenges to Congress. Their take was, "Doesn't this president realize that the November elections were a repudiation of his policies?" Well, not with gerrymandering, voter suppression, ballot controversies, etc. It's not entirely clear that the election meant anything -- and as Obama stated, he himself won election twice by huge margins. If government is composed of three equal branches, executive, legislative and judicial, then his office should consider itself empowered to follow the agenda upon which it was elected until such time as he is no longer in office.

I yell at the TV a lot.

I turned it off and read my book instead.

I only watched a few minutes of the address, then got bored and quit. I think it was better when the President just sent a note to Congress: "Things be cool. We chillin'." (I admit that those particular phrases were not popular in the time before the SOTU address became the norm.)

The address is nothing more than theater - and not good theater.

I wonder if anyone pointed out to Fox News that the Democratic Congressional candidates received a majority of the popular vote nationwide. As NoCo pointed out, if not for gerrymandering and other fraudulent election processes, the Republicans would control neither the House not the Senate. After the 2014 election, the Republicans took note of this, and started trying to change the procedure for the presidential vote count. They wanted the states to award electoral votes to the presidential candidate belonging to the party which won each House seat. Had that been the case, we would have an extremely white man in the White House today.