While the President seems energized and engaged talking about his Pax Americana and impending defeat of global tyranny, his administration is the one that can't seem to make the trains run on time. (I guess he skipped that part of the playbook.) Indeed, the second half of the SOTU, dealing with domestic policy, was a simple laundry list of recycled ideas, pipe dreams, head scratchers and total bullshit.

Perhaps underscoring this rhetorical limpness, his speechwriters front-loaded this section with the words "strengthening," "healthly," "vigorous," "growing faster," and "performance that is the envy of the world" all in the first two paragraphs. I half-expected "Bob" from the "natural male enhancement" commercials to run onto the podium and wave a jaunty hello.

Bush made an attempt at a unifying theme:



.. but this was half-hearted at best. So let's look at his "to do" list.



He can dress this up in "helping the working man" clothes all day long, but that doesn't change the fact that this massive giveaway has done more damage to the government's fiscal health than anything in recent memory (including Reagan). Want an example? Remember the big Social Security panic last year, where Bush went on the road to convince everyone that SS was doomed and that people should dump their money in the stock market instead? Well, here's an interesting little chart:



Rolling back just a portion of the Bush tax cuts would fund Social Security well into the 22nd century. But that doesn't help the rich, to whom tax breaks are worth more than SS. And it doesn't help the big brokerage houses eager to make money off Bush's "personal accounts" model (which would actually have left SS in worse shape than doing nothing at all).

But the Bush privatization plan died a quick death (which Bush ruefully noted Tuesday night to sarcastic cheers from the usually spineless left of the chamber). So let's move on.



It goes without saying that we had budget surpluses before Bush took over. But beyond that, Bush portraying himself as some sort of tight-fisted deficit hawk is laughable. (Invented history? Indeed.)

Here's how much I love you people. I went to the Office of Management and Budget site, where you can download Excel spreadsheets of all the mind-numbing tables from the President's budget documents. I picked the historical numbers, in constant dollars (so inflation's not a factor). I then created a friendly bar graph:



Notice what happened to tax revenue when Bush took over. Notice what happened to spending. Notice the ever-deepening hole we're creating for ourselves and the generations a-comin'.

Here's the painful part. The House just submitted a budget slashing $39 billion over five years from student loans, Medicare, Medicaid and farm subsidies, which Bush seems thrilled about. Yet they're getting ready to pass $70 billion in tax cuts over the same period. I don't think you need a graph to see where this is going.

What about the really big items in the budget, like Social Security and Medicare? His plan to gut Social Security in tatters, Bush unveiled a bold new initiative:



Applause, applause, applause.

On other subjects, Bush endorsed finding a way to let companies hire cheap Mexican labor without worrying about the INS:



The pre-speech hype suggested that we would hear a lot about health care. But the actual speech didn't have much, and what was there was seven kinds of vague. Here is every last word on health care:
 


This is the exact same mumbo-jumbo he's been pushing in the last several SOTU speeches. His only policy proposals seem to be health savings accounts (Otherwise known as the "you're on your own, good luck" plan -- how someone who can't afford health care in the first place is supposed to benefit from a savings account for health care is a mystery. It's like opening a checking account for a guy without a job.) and the ever-popular liability reform, which protects insurance company profits at the expense of malpractice victims' rights.

Then there was the big headline-grabber:



I was all set to rail about how misleading all this was and much of our imports come from outside the Middle East and work up a really good head of steam...

But then the White House said, "Ha! Just kidding! We didn't really mean it!" (See post below.) So never mind, then.

The man who embraces intelligent design theory, rejects global warming and censors any mention of it from goverment reports, and has crippled American genetic research with his pandering to the religious right then called for better science education:



Of course, he got in a quick shot in the culture wars, bashing "activist courts" who want to "redefine marriage," then lauded Roberts and Alito, followed by the Manimal Strategy.

Then, buried like a footnote, a brief mention of the complete devastation of a major American city:



That's it, then he segued into some half-baked education and AIDS babble that his heart clearly wasn't in. Unlike 9/11, this disaster didn't further Bush's agenda, so he clearly wishes it would just go away. There's really no other way to interpret this. He spent more time talking about his cherished illegal wiretaps than about the wrecking of New Orleans and hundreds of thousands of lives.

And that's pretty much it, apart from some closing guff about how he's like Lincoln and Martin Luther King as the Congresspeople angled for the best spot in the glad-handing line. Then off to bed, to sleep the sleep of the just.