Why should I be the only one who want too go bang their head against the wall?
Mpls (REALLY RED)Star Tribune
Editorial: State of the Union/A masterly salesman's pitch
George W. Bush may turn out to be the finest salesman who ever occupied the White House, a leader who sold a war in Iraq using bad intelligence, who enacted three big tax cuts the government could not afford and who won re-election even though a majority of voters had grave doubts about the policies he actually stands for.
(snip)
But a good salesman wants customers to fall in love with the product before they see the price tag, and so it was with major elements of Bush's speech. Sketching his plan to overhaul Social Security, he played on the obvious appeal for young workers of retirement accounts they can call their own. Yet he did not say the government will have to borrow billions of dollars and cut future Social Security benefits dramatically to finance those accounts -- never mind that such accounts do nothing to solve Social Security's current financial gap.
Bush also promised permanent new tax relief without telling voters that, when the government is running massive budget deficits, a tax cut today is merely a tax increase passed on to other taxpayers in future generations.
On foreign policy, Bush took time to bask in the warm afterglow of Sunday's election in Iraq. He was more than entitled; the election was an impressive success. But it's just plain wrong for Bush to use the prospect of democracy in Iraq to justify the invasion. That's not why the United States went to war.
Just this week the CIA said it had erred seriously in its pre-war analysis of the threat that Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction posed to the United States. That threat was the reason America went to war, and it turns out to have been entirely bogus.
(snip)
Moreover, there's a big gap between what Bush said and what U.S. policy is. World over, many of our closest allies are anything but democratic. To his credit, Bush named Saudi Arabia and Egypt as two friends that need to move toward democracy, but if the United States wants truly to become the chief purveyor of freedom, it must better match its actions to its rhetoric.
This was a brilliant speech, a credit to the president and his speech writers. But the details of Bush's budget, his Social Security reform proposals and his foreign policy may be much tougher to swallow than his words last night.
The loony left don't care about our fallen soldiers or their families .. they only want to see pictures of their coffins
OMG! Could she be any more ridiculous?