State of the Union
[UPDATE (9:25 PM): Give Stephen Green a big round of applause. And a drink; the man needs a drink. Why? He’s liveblogging the SOTU speech. For the umpteenth time.]
“Union?” What union? Obama’s speech is reported to be planned to be a broadside against Republicans:
Democrats consider President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday a launching point for a year of sustained assault on Republicans over a populist economic agenda, part of an effort to focus more on bread-and-butter issues and less on income inequality.
Actually, Obama’s entire presidency has been a “sustained assault.”
But I predict this speech won’t do a thing one way or the other. I am probably typical of many on the right when I say I won’t be listening to it. I will read it, and read about it, and probably write about it. But even among independents and liberals, there aren’t many people left who trust Obama and have faith in his abilities to turn things around, or who want to listen to him talk any more.
That doesn’t mean he won’t get some of what he wants, by hook or by crook (and at times with Republican help). It just means his speech tonight won’t be triumphant.
I’m providing this thread for you to discuss it—including those hardy souls who will actually watch it.
Could this happen?
Now some folks are going to say . . . that . . . other folks don’t deserve help, don’t deserve access to affordable health care, don’t deserve their god given right to birth control, don’t deserve heat or warmth or even food.
But these same folks already have it all …and…that just isn’t fair. This isn’t the America of our hope, or the America I’ve tried to make happen.
Now, I know many of you are frustrated. You can’t find a job that lifts you out of poverty. I’ll make sure your frustrations are heard, and because you have spoken, I will act. So, I am sending Congress home. All further laws will be passed by me on your behalf. I am suspending the division in our government by the executive authority granted by our Constitution. My emergency directive act will authorize my staff, the Department of Justice, and certain valuable organization such as Organizing for America and Planned Parenthood, to act as my direct agents for change, until you cease to be victimized by those who wish to prevent the fundamental transformation of the United States.
Not a masochist; and don’t enjoy watching those who are, revel in their ritual of humiliation.
At Ace’s place, they quoted Kevin Williamson saying the following:
The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship – it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting – with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.
It’s the most nauseating display in American public life – and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.
Neo, are you having trouble with your Yahoo email today? I can’t open any of my messages. Been having sporadic trouble of this type. [sigh]
Re the propaganda speech tonight: Comrade Zero will bang on about “income inequality,” and the Gonadless Old Party will avoid talking about “upward mobility,” the proper American rebuttal to the Socialistas.
I got the chance to shake Joe Wilson’s hand at a Republican gathering in NYC, and thank him personally for shouting “You Lie!” at that other SOTU farce. (I wasn’t the only one, either.)
Shame everlasting on the Gonadless Old Party for jumping on him for speaking truth to power. Shame.
That Kevin Williamson piece is awesome. He is, in my opinion, the best writer at the National Review, which is saying something given that VDH, Jonah Goldberg, Thomas Sowell, and Denis Prager write there. Check out the long but enjoyable first sentence of his article.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/369607/great-caesars-ghost-kevin-d-williamson
Also supplied by Beverly. But the rest of the article keeps up the tension and momentum.
Why bother to listen to someone who cannot be trusted? In my eye, Chairman O is beneath contempt. Too bad the dinosaur media carries his water.
Beverly,
I sometimes have trouble scrollling down to the end of a mail. Why couldn’t they have kept the old version for people who use laptops and made the new version an option for people who use cell phones and tablets? Geeks and nerds just don’t want to deal with people who aren’t interested in being cool.
Re SOTU: Yahoo.de just had a report on how Obama was going to get tough. Somewhere in the middle, they mentioned his frustration with the ultra-right Tea Partiers. Ultra-right translates to neonazi in current German.
I won’t stay up all night to watch it. If ther’s anything good in the responses, I can catch them tomorrow.
The two most interesting things to happen at the SOTU were the Supreme Court boycott of Clinton, an amazing incident which ought to (but will never) get the fame it deserves.
And the congress creature telling Omama “you lie.”
Actually another supreme court justice descively shook his head to indicate he thought Obama was lying, but I forget who and when.
Maybe Jason Collins will blew Obama a kiss.
But mostly, who cares?
If the article is not about what a disgraceful travesty the whole thing is (like Steyn or Williamson today), it is an article not worth reading.
Off topic but: I live just north of Destin, FL. We have 5″ icicles hanging from the roof now and we’re supposed to have a half-inch of frozen global warming on the roads tonight. Al Gore must be visiting.
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“Al Gore must be visiting.”
The temperature in Iowa drops 10 degrees every time he flysover in his carbon belching private jet. ;-0
As far as the SOTU goes, I haven’t listen to any of them since Reagan left office with the sole exception of Dubya’s after 911. I’ve heard enough of BHO’s voice to last 10,000 life times. His continuous campaigning and finger pointing has become such a turn off I can’t believe anyone other than the MSM will be paying attention.
When everyone around you is evil, unity isn’t such a good thing any more.
Oh, my – Kevin W. does have a way with words of witty abuse, doesn’t he?
I won’t be watching it, either. I can only suppress my gag reflex for so long. If the establishment GOP had any balls at all, they’d sit on their hands and watch the whole sorry monologue with a stony face and refrain from applause. But then if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.
I wonder if he will really step down at the end of his term. I honestly wouldn’t — at this date — put it past him to overturn the constitutional amendment and go for a third term as the favored Dem nominee. How bad has it become that scenarios that were once tinfoil-hat-land are now getting to be considered seriously.
Indeed a proper response:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lowsgFuNtU
I have yet to see an Obama speech. I never sat through a Clinton speech. Hmmm…or a Carter speech.
He will deliver “state of the onion”. It’s corpse-man humor. Not everyone will appreciate it.
Sgt Mom, “I wonder if he will really step down at the end of his term.”
With his man, given the current congress and the courts, nothing is beyond belief. The executive branch is now lawless, having laid low the laws. If he thinks he can get away with running for a third term or declaring martial law he will go for it with the MSM cheering him on.
waitforit at 3:27 pm:
I agree about Kevin Williamson. I’ve only been reading his stuff for the last 6 months or so but have never been disappointed. His recent piece titled The White Ghetto was Pulitzer-grade.
On topic: I won’t be watching TV tonight other than to monitor the local news on Atlanta’s “Snow-Jam 2014!”: We got almost 2 inches since noon today and the entire Metro area (pop. now around 4 million) has been utterly paralyzed.
parker @6:29pm:
Agreed.
I won’t listen. I can’t stand the sound of his voice.
Heh. The Western Rifle Shooters Association featured an encore presentation of “What I Saw at the Coup” in honor of the SOTU address.
I linked the original here just the other day.
It is worth re-reading.
Maybe I should listen all the way through on Obama speech. So far, I have only listened in snippets, such as when he informed the hoi polloi why we don’t need to drill for more oil.
Which is one of the best examples of stand-up comedy I have come across in a long time.
I just need the endurance to take 15 minutes of that stuff.
Mr. “waitforit” : your parody @ January 28th, 2014 at 3:09 pm was JUST DAMN SCARY.
Waaaay too possible…
– – – – –
Nah, I never watch Obama’s SotU any more. Dear Loser starts prattling and I start yelling at the TV. Not good for my blood pressure.
Do you want a palate cleanser? A bracing restorative?
Richard Burton greatly admired Winston Churchill. In an interview on Parkinson’s BBC chat show in the 1970s, he told a very funny tale of “the Old Man” coming to see him play Hamlet in the West End — and reciting the whole play from his box!
That interview ended with Burton reading Churchill’s magnificent rallying cry, “Blood, toil, tears, and sweat”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYGU03oMkBY
Churchill was the greatest man of the twentieth century.
Peter O’Toole, on an old Charlie Rose show, was in awe of Churchill as well, and the way he spoke of him makes the hair stand up on your head.
The first 2:50 mins. of this are O’Toole remembering vividly being a boy in World War II and how Hitler scared him; and then that Voice, Churchill:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNp10xlCd8Y
(yeah, the whole interview is good.) I just finished reading Volume I of The Last Lion. Fantastic (with the one objection that Manchester, apparently a liberal, didn’t get Churchill’s opposition to socialism).
Burton’s marvelous Churchill anecdote: starts at 29:40: “… and I hear this extraordinary rumble”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcSuQf4RZWs
(yeah, the whole interview was good.)
Obama says he’ll do an end run around Congress – around the Law essentially.
We have to do an end run around Obama. We have to find a way.
He’s not our President. I am not his “fellow American”. He is a lawless tyrant and tin pan demagogue. He is the worst thing that ever happened to America. The people who support him are simply the worst Americans there has ever been.
Neither he nor they deserve a dime of our money or an ounce of our respect.
Gunk up their works at every chance you get. Give them not an inch without a mile of their effort. Bungle up everything.
And support Ted Cruz. He is the only one who will call this Stalinist what he is to his face.
I haven’t listened to an Obama speech since before January 20, 2009. Hits me in my Oversensitive Gag Reflex for Bull***t and my nausea-rash index. I read them—IF I need to—in the days following.
So, I happily watched 2-“old” Law & Order episodes on WE and during commercials would mute the clicker and go over to His Blathering Majesty for a few moments. Boehner always looked like he’d swallowed a toad and Biden looked like the Lapdog-Shill that he is.
I’ll now read/listen to folks I trust(including N-Neo)and see what, if anything, of the 85-minute snake oil sell I should read.
Now, back to Jill Hennessey, Angie Harmon and Jerry Orbach!!
On the Charlie Rose interview of Peter O’Toole. Did I detect a disdain from O’Toole for Rose, especially the laconic answers with that great stare? I felt intimidated!
And on an earlier thread about poetry, it was mentioned how a certain line need only be heard once and we remember them. How about this from O’Toole:
“a concatenation of extraordinary circumstances and incidences.”
I did not rewind, but I bet that that is exactly what he said. It’s perfect blank verse.
From one of our very, very good friends, today’s Op-Ed at the NYT: “Is deepening inequality inevitable? The case for a global wealth tax.”
Makes my stomach turn.
On “Climate Change” — The debate if over, the science is clear, etc.
Doctor Einstein Obama, scientist, statesman, scholoar.
I’ve ever seen a bigger, more uninformed ignoramous in my life. All the more amazing that he manages to work himself into an indignant outrage should anyone would question his vast wisdom.
Obama posesses an ego that rivals the worst tyrants that have ever walked the earth; the only thing that prevents him from exercising it to it’s hideous potential, it that he’s as lazy and inept as he is arrogant and condescending.
From what I’ve read on other sites, very few Republicans could stomach watching the SotU and even Democrats seemed less than enthused.
Obama’s playing small-ball. He doesn’t have the moral authority or “magic” to inspire his own side to action, and there is also the very real threat of them losing their midterm elections if they get too close.
Relatedly (although it may not seem like it), the international financial situation is becoming more dicey by the day. We may not make it to November before a major financial event occurs which will negatively impact the US.
Obama is now a prisoner of events out of his control, and the outlook is rather nasty.
I want to redistribute the power. The wealth redistributors will do the same thing, right?
I wonder if he will really step down at the end of his term. I honestly wouldn’t – at this date – put it past him to overturn the constitutional amendment and go for a third term as the favored Dem nominee. How bad has it become that scenarios that were once tinfoil-hat-land are now getting to be considered seriously.
Clinton himself said that if the American people wanted to, they should get a chance to vote him back into office, since it wasn’t consecutive.
So what people consider crazy thoughts, are only crazy outside the Left.