DNC State of the Union Attack – FactCheck.org:
The President left out a few things when surveying the State of the Nation:
- He proudly spoke of “writing a new chapter in the story of self-government” in Iraq and Afghanistan and said the number of democracies in the world is growing. He failed to mention that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan yet qualify as democracies according to the very group whose statistics he cited.
- Bush called for Congress to pass a line-item veto, failing to mention that the Supreme Court struck down a line-item veto as unconstitutional in 1998. Bills now in Congress would propose a Constitutional amendment, but none have shown signs of life.
- The President said the economy gained 4.6 million jobs in the past two-and-a-half years, failing to note that it had lost 2.6 million jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office. The net gain since Bush took office is just a little more than 2 million.
- He talked of cutting spending, but only “non-security discretionary spending.” Actually, total federal spending has increased 42 percent since Bush took office.
- He spoke of being “on track” to cut the federal deficit in half by 2009. But the deficit is increasing this year, and according to the Congressional Budget Office it will decline by considerably less than half even if Bush’s tax cuts are allowed to lapse.
- Bush spoke of a “goal” of cutting dependence on Middle Eastern oil, failing to mention that US dependence on imported oil and petroleum products increased substantially during his first five years in office, reaching 60 per cent of consumption last year.
[. . . ]
Whether imports from the Middle East can ever be “a thing of the past” is open to question. It is true that the US currently imports nearly as much oil from nearby Canada (2.1 million barrels per day last year) as it does from all Persian Gulf countries combined (2.3 million barrels per day), but that’s still a lot of oil to do without.
So are we invading Canada next?
The whole article is reasonably interesting, though FC shies away from calling a spade a spade. A speech like this is not an extemporaneous riff, but a calculated political message. Omissions or errors are not accidents (unless one wants to accuse the administration of even more egregious incompetence).
Someone somewhere said it better than I could: any speech by this president can be safely ignored, since they are all politics and no policy. Reading through the highlights above, it’s like a poll or survey, to see which points garner the best response. With 24 hours, the pledge to cut Middle Eastern oil imports by 75% was quietly recanted as “purely an example.”
This administration, to its cynical benefit, has figured out that it’s easy to lie or spin the facts upfront and correct them later, since no one will read the corrections. The 24 hour news-cycle is now a 30 second attention span.
Now playing: Mr Kennedy by The Soft Boys from the album “Nextdoorland”