State of the Union Thread

Our Delusional Hedgehog

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, January 24, 2007; A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/23/AR2007012301563_pf.html

In the beginning, George W. Bush sent American forces into Iraq with no apparent thought about the sectarian tensions that could explode once Saddam Hussein was ousted. Now, nearing the end of his presidency, Bush is sending more American forces into Iraq with no apparent regard for the verdict of the American people, rendered in November's election, that they've had it with his war. And, by the evidence of all available polling, with Bush himself.

The decline in Bush's support to Watergate-era Nixonian depths since he announced that his new Iraq policy was his old Iraq policy, only more so, stems, I suspect, from three conclusions that the public has reached about the president and his war. The first, simply, is that the war is no longer winnable and, worse, barely comprehensible since it has evolved into a Sunni-Shiite conflict. The second is that Bush, in all matters pertaining to his war, is a one-trick president who keeps doing the same thing over and over, never mind that it hasn't worked. In Isaiah Berlin's typology of leaders, Bush isn't merely a hedgehog who knows one thing rather than many things. He's a delusional hedgehog who knows one thing that isn't so.

The third, and politically most dangerous, conclusion is that Bush appears genuinely indifferent to the electoral judgment of the American people, who seem to believe that they are, in some vague sense, sovereign, at least on Election Day. The Post-ABC News poll released Monday, in which Bush's approval rating had sunk to a record-low 33 percent, also showed a corollary decline in the public's assessment of Bush's personal attributes. The two questions about Bush's personal qualities on which he polled the lowest, and that most closely mirrored his overall approval rating, concerned his willingness "to listen to different points of view" (36 percent) and his understanding of "the problems of people like you" (32 percent). Turns out that if you blow off the clear mandate of a national election, people actually notice.

In the war itself, meanwhile, our current policy has achieved new depths of senselessness. The administration is lining up support from our longtime Sunni allies in the region -- Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt in particular -- as a buffer against the spreading influence of Shiite Iran within Iraq and across the Middle East. Inside Iraq, meanwhile, we have cast our lot with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a sectarian Shiite with long-standing ties to Iran, and hedged our bet by cultivating the support of another Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who is even closer to Iran.

Hakim heads the Iranian-backed Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). His deputy, Adel Abdul Mahdi, was in the running to become prime minister until the head of SCIRI's rival Shiite party, Moqtada al-Sadr, threw his support to Maliki. According to a New York Times report on Sunday, some administration officials are discussing quietly shifting our backing to Hakim's party. Others oppose this, pointing out that the raid in which U.S. forces seized Iranian operatives in Baghdad last month took place within Hakim's own compound.

More broadly, our plan for stability in Iraq is to bolster whichever Shiite administration governs the country, no matter its closeness to Iran, in the groundless hope that it will establish nonsectarian order. Our plan for stability in the region is to enlist Sunni states to contain Iran. These plans cancel each other out.

This isn't an example of Kissingerian subtlety -- waging the Cold War, for instance, by tilting toward China over the Soviet Union. This is an example of world-class incoherence, entirely of our own making. We charged into Iraq with some dim sense that Hussein's successor government would be headed by representatives of the long-persecuted Shiite majority, but we assumed that comity would prevail between the Shiites and the displaced Sunnis. Then we rendered that dicey proposition all but impossible by sacking the Iraqi army and most of the civil service -- in effect, plunging the Sunni population into mass unemployment with no prospect of reemployment. We fed the Sunni resistance, which fed the Shiite retaliation.

Now, we are stuck backing an Iran-friendly Shiite sectarian regime in Iraq, even as we plan to spend hundreds of millions in aid to the Lebanese army to fend off the Shiite sectarian forces of Hezbollah, and even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice scuttles from one Sunni state to the next in an attempt to build a firewall around Iran. This is foreign policy as nonsense, as the American people have apparently figured out.

 

By the way... did anyone else besides me notice that the subway guy was so iimportant that they actually had him literally sitting on the steps?

 

Snooze of the Union
George Bush puts Americans to sleep. Jim Webb wakes them up.

By Harold Meyerson
Web Exclusive: 01.24.07
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12397

The White House must have known that this wouldn't be a rouser. The president had nothing new to say about Iraq, yet he had to discuss it -- not the real Iraq, of course, but his own private Iraq that no one else can recognize -- for half of the speech. Even his list of foiled terrorist plots was a collection of golden oldies from years gone by. As to his bold new domestic agenda, it was at once so piecemeal and complicated that it defied description, so when it came to the most important element -- the president's new health care proposal -- he essentially declined to describe it. The utterly threadbare quality of the Republican domestic vision was encapsulated by the fact that the biggest Republican applause line on matters domestic came after the president vowed to reintroduce legislation limiting medical liability. No wonder these guys lost.

So, knowing that no good would come from the speech, the president actually did something almost diabolically clever. He began by discussing the deficit, then shifted to a discourse on earmarks. Surely, the goal of starting off with the most stupefyingly boring topics known to man was simply to get Americans to change the channel. Eyes glazing over, emitting sudden snores, catching themselves slipping off the couch, viewers must have shaken themselves awake and gone channel-surfing. Anything but Bush on deficits, dear God. Was E! still screening the Oscar nominees? The Weather Channel had some nice stuff on fires in Malibu, didn't it?

But Bush's modest proposals, delivered with all the intensity of a guy reading a seed catalog, were countered by the most electrifying Democratic rebuttal in recent memory. That Jim Webb is an eloquent writer and plain speaker, an economic populist and a hard-headed opponent of the war in Iraq hardly qualifies as a revelation. Nonetheless, his discussion of the two Americas, and more particularly his blunt and straightforward evocation of what the economy has become for ordinary Americans, professionals as well as manufacturing and service workers, was stunning. Webb spoke of, for, and to an America whose existence Republicans hardly recognize. For that matter, you could go through the collected utterances of the vast majority of Democratic pols -- Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama among them -- without finding so unflinching a description of the effects of the globalized economy on the American people.

Part of Webb's genius -- and for eight minutes on Tuesday night, Webb was a genius -- was his ability to situate his message in the mainstream of American history. Concern for the average man? Check out Andy Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt. Extricating ourselves from a military quagmire? Follow the lead of Dwight Eisenhower.

What was particularly exhilarating was Webb's conceptual economy. No laundry lists. No need, with Speaker Pelosi presiding, to affirm the party’s commitment to gender equity. There were two main issues separating Democrats and Republicans -- economic fairness and sanity in Iraq -- and Webb had the good sense to spend his eight minutes focused on those.

All praise not just to Webb, who emerged from the evening as the newest national Democratic star, but to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for selecting him to give the party's response. Praise to Pelosi, too, for setting up a special committee on global warming. Now that Bush is talking fuel efficiency standards, the Democrats need to maintain their clear lead over the Republicans on energy and environmental issues, and taking that issue at least partly out of the hands of John Dingell (D-Beleaguered American Auto Industry) was a very smart move.

Meanwhile, Bush is done speaking. Wake up.

 

This puzzled me last night...

But didn't he begin the message with:

Thank you very much.

And tonight, I have the high privilege and distinct honor of my own, as the first president to begin the State of the Union message with these words:

Now, if he had said: "Madam Speaker, Thank you very much," that would have made sense.

 

No, I watched it. Even forgetting the Thank you very much, the words

I have the high privilege and distinct honor of my own, as the first president to begin the State of the Union message with these words:

were clearly part of his prepared and read remarks. It's no big deal... just a piece of awkward writing that literally didn't make sense. He could have easily said something like:

I have the high privilege and distinct honor of my own, as the first president to use these words in a State of a Union message: Madam Speaker.

 

Bush Unscripted... highlights from today's speech on his SOTU energy proposals at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware...

But first I want to thank all the good folks at DuPont for really leading with your brains. And as the Secretary of Energy, Sam Bodman, told me coming in -- he said, when he was -- see, he's like a graduate from MIT, which -- so he's a smart guy and I'm the President. But anyway -- (laughter.) It's the way it works sometimes, you know.

And what's interesting about the debate is it's the confluence of national security and economic security concerns and environmental concerns that come together and can be solved at the same time by technologies. It's really what's begun to evolve here in America. In other words, we can get beyond the post-Kyoto -- the pre-Kyoto era with a post-Kyoto strategy, the center of which is new technologies.

Secondly, if you're dependent on oil overseas, it means that -- and a hostile regime, a regime hostile to the United States produces that oil, you become vulnerable to the activity of a hostile regime. In other words, somebody doesn't like us, they produce the oil, they decide to do something about it, they can affect us. That's -- when I talk about the national security risks, that's what I mean. In other words, you don't want your President sitting in the Oval Office worried about the activities of a hostile regime that could have all kinds of impacts on our security, starting with economic security.

One, we began a hydrogen initiative that -- where a lot of smart folks are beginning to research whether or not we can power automobiles by hydrogen. We think it's possible. But it's not going to be possible until I'm 75, which is probably 15 years from now. Your children may very well likely be driving in automobiles powered by hydrogen -- the waste product which is water, by the way. But something has got to happen in the interim. I mean, we can't wait, for economic reasons or national security reasons, for hydrogen to kick in. In other words, it's still a dream.

And so we're pushing two interesting types of technologies: one, battery technologies -- lithium ionic batteries. For all you history majors out there, let me put it to you this way -- (laughter) -- one of these days you're going to plug your car into your garage, and you're going to be able to drive the first 20 miles on electricity, and your car is not going to have to look like a golf cart.

And so,last night, based upon what I just told you -- based upon optimism, new science, progress that we have made -- I announced a goal for the country which is to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next 10 years. If we are -- when we do that, it will mean that we have reduced the amount of imported oil from the Middle East -- or the equivalent of the imported oil from the Middle East by about three-quarters. And that's important. It's really going to be important for your children that this country has become able to -- be able to say to the hostile regime, leave us alone, you can't affect us, we'll protect ourselves in all kinds of ways from you.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070124-4.html

 

You're right, he didn't directly respond to what Bush said last night.

He responded to what Bush has done the last 6 years.