State of the Union is nearly hunky-dory

As required by law President Obama delivered his State of the Union message to Congress this past Tuesday. The Constitution says, in Section 3 of Article 2, “He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

Most of the time in the early years of our Union the president would just have a letter delivered to Congress and that would be that. “To whom it may concern, the Union is doing well, despite all you knobs in Congress.”

It wasn’t until the 20^th Century that presidents started making it a habit to give a live address in front of a joint session of Congress.

So, every year at about this time the president trots his fanny perpendicular into the combined chamber of Congress and delivers a speech and thanks to the magic of television, we get to watch it. And not only that, there’s a rebuttal to follow — and in this age of the Tea Party, two rebuttals. The nice thing about the Tea Party rebuttal is they always get the crazy ones for that so it becomes more of an entertainment show than a political speech … although this year the Tea Party double-dipped because one of their besties delivered the Republican rebuttal.

This year President Obama gave his fifth State of the Union Address on Tuesday, Feb. 12.  All the major networks carried it, as did the two cable news networks and FoxNews.

He started by quoting President John F. Kennedy who said during his address in 1962, “The Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress…It is my task to report the State of the Union – to improve it is the task of us all.”

Judging from what’s transpired since Tuesday Night, President Obama’s call for more unity seems to have been ignored.

There’s one thing that’s been in the front of the speech — every State of the Union — since 1996, President Obama started his speech by telling us everything was (nearly) hunkey dory. “With renewed confidence we can declare the state of our union is stronger.”

Well there you go. Let’s all stop bickering and move on.

President Obama is right. More people are back to work since he first took office four years ago and the Dow Jones has risen nearly 70 percent with Barack Obama in the White House. In fact, the wealthy and big business have done so well during Obama’s administration you would have thought the business community would have been in his camp for this last election.

So, what’s the problem? Real income is down five percent and the number of people living below the poverty line has risen by 6.4 million. The president addressed those realities too with his calls to strengthen the Middle Class. He wants to create 15 manufacturing hubs around the country to attract innovative new industries that create hundreds of thousands good paying jobs.

Once again the president told Congress that we must put money into fixing our infrastructure, putting a spotlight on the 70,000 bridges that are below code in the U.S. I think it was Jon Stewart who asked if that included all the bridges of Madison County. We can’t have those falling down on us.

He didn’t mention every dam, tunnel, dike, levee and freeway that needs work, but he did mention, once again, updating our power and utilities grid. A smart grid they call it. I don’t know … if you’ve been keeping up on the Terminator movies then you know that’s just what the machines are waiting to see take place.

• Hey, if President Reagan can invoke Star Wars for a crazy anti-missile plan, I can bring in a movie franchise that’s equally absurd as a metaphor.

It’s estimated that if we started fixing our bridges, dams, tunnels, dikes, levees and roads, as well as schools, hospitals and police and fire stations, over a million people would be back to work almost immediately. The GOP of course says we can’t afford to bring our nation into the 21^st Century; it’s the nation debt! “The national debt, Mr. President!”

Remember in the run-up to the 2010 mid-term elections the GOP said it was about jobs?

Back to the speech. The president said the people expect government to put country before party. That’s really a good point, but as we’ve seen just this week the Senate Republicans filibustered the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, the first time a cabinet appointment has been subjected to that action.

The reason why though was put to rest when Senator John McCain said on Thursday, “There’s a lot of ill will toward Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly, at one point said he was the worst president since Herbert Hoover, said the surge (in Iraq) was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which was nonsense. He was anti-his own party and people. People don’t forget that. You can disagree, but if you’re disagreeable, then people don’t forget that.”

So the good senator from Arizona, a Vietnam veteran himself, is holding up the appointment of the Secretary of Defense because of a seven year old resentment?

Then there was that Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, who accused Hagel of taking money from Iran and North Korea and that’s why he was filibustering Hagel’s appointment. So much for putting country before party — or personal political ambition.

When the president called on Congress to act to avoid the coming sequester, it was to a Republican Party still determined to undermine everything the president tries to accomplish. Just Thursday Speaker of the House John Boehner said the sequester was the president’s idea so let him figure it out. Forget about the fact that Congress voted for the sequester, let the president and Democrats do it.

• The Dems actually brought up a plan to delay the sequester. We’ll see how that goes.

We can guess what the GOP response is and will be with the president’s naïve notion that Congress should, “… keep the promises we’ve already made,” by passing a bill to raise the debt limit, saying, “We can’t keep going, drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next. Let’s always uphold the full faith and credit of the United States.” Ah that president, what a dreamer.

In his speech the president pushed the fight against global warming, tying it to job growth. He said we could no longer ignore the science that overwhelmingly shows that human activity is warming the planet at an alarming rate. But we have these crazy Republicans in Congress who still deny global warming is real and so the ones that you might think are reasonable won’t go along with reason for fear of being Teabagged in the next Republican primaries.

He spoke for comprehensive immigration reform, which might have a chance since there are some Republicans who did the math in the last election and saw they were losing Hispanic voters in droves. But of course there are the Tea Partiers who are totally against it so it’s still iffy.

In a bold move President Obama singled out two of the reddest states in the Union for having very forward-thinking policies for pre-kindergarten education. Georgia and Oklahoma. Obama said we should have a universal pre-K program based on those found in those two states. You know there are Oklahomans thinking, “What? We did something the president likes? We better stop doing that!”

The president told us 34,000 troops would be coming home from Afghanistan in the next year and combat troops would be completely out by the end of 2014.

Continuing in the national security vein, President Obama said Congress and we the people needed to be better informed on his counter-terrorism efforts, in particular his use of drones to kill suspected terrorist. Okay, we’ll see how that goes.

But the strongest, most emotional moments were left to the end of the speech when the president pushed for his plans to strengthen gun laws. In the audience were victims and families of victims of gun violence, including many from Newtown, Connecticut, as well as Nathanial and Cleopatra, Pendleton, parents of Hadiya Pendleton, who was gunned down in a Chicago park, just a mile from the president’s home.

Former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly were in attendance, as were victims and family members from the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, Tucson, Arizona, Oak Creek, Wisconsin and elsewhere. Members of Congress brought victims of gun violence to the speech to make the point that something needed to be done and the president acknowledged not only their presence in the chamber, but their suffering and heartache.

In an impassioned moment of oratory President Obama said these victims and their families deserved a vote. The members of Congress could vote no, that is their right, but the victims of gun violence deserved a vote. It even brought Speaker Boehner to his feet. He couldn’t sit impassively when his former colleague in the House of Representatives was mentioned.

The president spoke almost about an hour and after the speech the pundits began deciphering the president’s words and in that time-worn cynicism of theirs they bandied about what the possibilities of a new year — the consensus being: same shit, new Congress.

Not to worry, the entertainment was about to start. The GOP found a new voice last year. A Tea Party favorite who not only carries that Teabagger satchel, he’s a gosh darn Hispanic guy to boot! The great brown hope, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida!

Rubio assured everyone he was of the Middle Class, that he couldn’t have gotten through college without government aid and his mother depends on Social Security and Medicare … and then he put forth the GOP’s plan to gut both. It got funnier. In his speech Rubio referenced a fictional State of the Union Address, one given by the President Obama the GOP made up for their voters. Any sane people who bothered to watch the GOP rebuttal had to be wondering, “WTF is he talking about?” because Rubio’s references to the president’s address bore no resemblance to Obama’s actual speech.

But that wasn’t even the best part. Nope. Rubio started sweating, his mouth was dry, and he was smacking his lips, trying in vain to coax saliva into his mouth. As if he was filming a skit for Saturday Night Live, he reached out of the camera frame — way out of the camera frame — to get a drink of water, Poland Springs to be exact. It was the funniest moment ever in State of the Union rebuttals. If you thought Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was funny, Rubio made Jindal look downright professional.

Few people will remember anything Rubio said, which doesn’t matter. It was basically the same talking points the GOP has been trotting out to the public for years. What everyone will remember is that he was the water boy. Thanks to late night comedy TV everyone in America got to watch the GOP’s water boy in action.

Ending the evening’s entertainment was Rand Paul. Rand Paul … none of the pundits talk about his address because it was ridiculous. The Tea Party gets about as much respect from the American electorate as Congress and the GOP, which is not much.

But Rand Paul soldiered on, in relative obscurity. This is why we don’t take the Tea Party seriously: Paul couldn’t even reference the Declaration of Independence correctly. At the beginning of his speech he said, “America is exceptional because we were founded upon the notion that everyone should be free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.”

No Senator Paul, as the Declaration states, “… they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We are guaranteed the rights of Life and Liberty. We don’t have to pursue those rights. If he can’t even get the founding document of our nation correct, just how qualified is he to be a senator? Really Kentucky? You voted for this guy.

Then he goes into the usual nonsense about smaller government and cutting spending and taxes. It’s always about that. Here’s what Paul and his like-minded Republicans fail to tell their constituents: those of you who claim to be Teabaggers and agree with Senator Paul, you must renounce any and all federal aid you might be receiving, including (but not limited to) Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and any other welfare programs that send you a government check once a month. You want to get real with your Tea Party and the nation, run that up the flagpole and see who salutes.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty dramatic and entertaining speech, in a paranoid, conspiracy nut sort of way.

It’s been an entertaining week, with the Grammys, the Pope resigning and then the State of the Union and the two rebuttals. But no more interruptions to my TV schedule. We want to watch The Bachelor and NCIS! Sean tells all next Tuesday on The Bachelor!