bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 ::

Andrew Sullivan on the SOTU speech
I was too busy watching my befuddling Missouri Tigers drop back to .500 in an overtime loss to the Texas Longhorns last night to bother watching President Bush's State of the Union Address. I figured it'd be more of the same, anyway. (Kind of like watching my pathetic Missouri Tigers.) So I must rely on secondhand analysis from the pundits of blogdom to shape my views. So far, in my brief web-surfing this morning, Andrew Sullivan's summary seems on the money (this, again, coming from someone who didn't bother to watch):

Bill Clinton's State of the Union addresses were often derided as laundry lists of new proposals without any larger, unifying theme. But last night George W. Bush seemed to do him one better (or, rather, worse): A laundry list of past achievements. The tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Patriot Act--all of these could reasonably be described as notches in the president's belt. But they're not much as an agenda for the future. Even the speech's high point--the president's aggressive defense of the war against Saddam and the war on terror--was extraordinarily backward-looking. It's not exactly the best strategy for kicking off an election year.

Sullivan goes on to applaud Bush's defense of the war, but notes that Bush offered little vision for the future. "[W]hat of the future? How do we deal with Iran or Syria or Pakistan or North Korea? Barely a squeak. What are our plans with regard to the hand-over of power in Iraq? Nothing but bland assurances that everything will be okay. A State of the Union shouldn't be an answer to every criticism. It should surely be a guidepost to what lies ahead. But almost all of the president's agenda was micromanaging the tax code or demanding the retention of initiatives already passed."

Also, in his separate blog entry about the SOTU, Sullivan provides a nice summary of the Democratic response (which I also didn't watch):
AND THEN ... : I watched Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle. Good grief. What whining weenies. Back to Bush.

:: Andrew 07:57 + ::
...

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