The State of Disunion

Obama's SOTU was a nicely delivered platter of vagueness and platitudes, mostly PR, with very little substance.  It didn't work.  The one bright spot is he didn't go after Social Security.  Less than a month ago, I was convinced he would.

Realistically, Obama is not, and has never been, any kind of liberal. He is a centrist conservative, and for him to move to the middle would mean moving to the left.  In a world that made sense, Obama would be a Republican. He governs to the right of Clinton, and Clinton was to the right of Eisenhower. O gave a very rational Republican SOTU – only the second one we have heard since 1999.

It was not only centrist in tone, it was full of explicit overtures to the party of “Hell, NO!”  In the Rethug response, Paul Ryan dispelled any fantasies we might have had about working together.





As it that weren't bad enough, here's Michelle Bachmann, speaking for the Tea party Express.  Keep the Tums handy.





Shorter Obama: "We need to work together to solve our problems."

Shorter Ryan: "Obama is the problem."

Shorter Bachmann: "Obama is responsible for everything bad in the world, including the high price of gas."

We are in “the early days of a history making turn” though – that’s the one thing she said that wasn’t either stupid, a lie, or blazingly irrelevant - really - WWII?!?.  Which way we are going to turn is very uncertain, though.

Obama isn’t much of a progressive, but he does want progress.

Rethugs are regressive.  They want a return to the Gilded Age.

The Tea Party is Neanderthal.

It’s just that stark.

So -- are we screwed, or what?
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