The state of the union, indeed. The state of the union is, first, still unified. By that I mean the 50 states are still sending their money to Washington and their kids to Iraq. After that, the middle class is still in the middle, the rich still are getting richer, and it’s getting a little more difficult to keep the beggars off the streets, but we’re doing our best by building jails as fast as we can.

This custom of expecting the President to address a joint session of Congress once a year to report how things are going has been around for quite a while. In fact, it predates electronic communication, so it’s a bit of an antique, if not a dinosaur, but these days, it’s as close as you can get to gauging what the government might be up to. Probably, there was a time when the President actually wrote the speech himself and tried to be candid, but I don’t think that happened in my lifetime. People who work for the President spend a long time crafting this speech. Some of them decide what the primary themes will be and what secondary themes should be mentioned, and in what order. Some probably get paid just to decide what the President must not say. Hello, Karl Rove. In the end, a couple of obscure writers will construct the sentences which the President actually speaks.

This speech is supposed to be an important event, the occasion when the President sets the tone and lays out the agenda for the coming year, but I suspect the guy who currently thinks he’s the President sees it almost like a day off. Bush is the most remote President any of us ever has seen. When he makes a speech, it’s almost always on a military base or in front of a carefully screened audience. He avoids any situation where he might face an aggressive question or be expected to say anything that isn’t in the script. So the state of the onion address is perfect. Read the script, bask in the applause, and no one gets to ask any questions.

Often, a President uses the annual speech to make real proposals, but I doubt that it means much to Mr. Dubya. Despite the Republican majority in Congress, the Bush presidency has been conspicuously lacking in legislative activism. Dub hasn’t tried to persuade Congress to do much of anything except rubber stamp what he’s done under what he perceives to be his unlimited executive authority. His speech on Tuesday included a couple of suggestions that he might be proposing legislation, such as his reference to a "competitiveness initiative," but believe it when you see it, and if you ever see it, examine it carefully.

I heard a lot of noise in advance of the speech that Bush would make some grand pronouncements about health care policy. He didn’t. He wandered through the subject casually, making no specific proposals, but dropping a few hints in the direction that had been predicted, that we’re all going to be on our own when it comes to medical care. He said, in effect, that everything is cool on the health care front, implying that the federal government isn’t planning to do anything to improve the situation. You can go down to the mine every day for your whole life, but the company isn’t going to cover your medical care and isn’t going to cover your retirement. This is another clue that the middle class may not remain middle much longer. If you’re expected to work for the man all your life, but you don’t have a secure retirement and you can’t afford medical care, you’re not especially motivated to work for the man all your life. It really doesn’t matter to the man; he’s already farmed your job out to someone in another country who works cheaper, anyway, but someone should be considering what the middle class in the U.S. will be doing when they aren’t mowing their lawns in the suburbs anymore. It could get ugly. The Bushwhacker made some noise in the speech about how new jobs have been developed in recent years. Have you seen them? I think they’re all in Asia.

The so-called President devoted much of the speech to defending his little military adventure in Iraq. We’ve covered that territory before, but as long as Bush keeps talking about it, the rest of us are obligated to keep talking about it too. Dub claimed in his speech that he’s committed to developing alternative energy technology and eliminating reliance on oil from the middle east. In the same speech, he defended the U.S. policy of colonizing the middle east with military force in order to get the oil. I don’t think I need to explain that Dub is lying out of one side of his mouth, nor do I need to say which side that is.

Part of the ritual of the state of the union speech is the applause every time the President pauses. Even the Democrats who claim to be opposed to the President’s policies stand up and clap. A couple of times during Bush’s speech on Tuesday, however, I detected applause which wasn’t complimentary to the speaker. When he mentioned the failure of the Congress to buy his proposal to hijack Social Security, and when he said, "Elected officials must uphold the public trust," it sounded like the applause was not exactly a gesture of support. The network TV station I was watching went to a shot of Hillary Clinton on both occasions. Obviously, she’s being set up by the media as a presidential candidate in ‘08, so when are we going to hear about her plan to stop the military occupation of Iraq? More important, when is the media going to ask her or any other Democrat that question?

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