Well, it looks as though the President has learned to deliver a speech.
I still doubt the validity of a Social Security crisis, and tend to believe the arguments of those not pressing for the privatization of Social Security.
I’m not sure how I feel about the section on African-American empowerment… it feels like ‘help them po negros’ to me. Just let them be Americans without emphasizing their blackness or their need. Why do we insist on humiliating people as we ‘help’ them?
Similarly, the whole bit about the commoditization of human life seems over-dramatic, and I’m not sold on the contents of a test tube or Petri dish being human at all.
The rhetoric on the Middle East is nice – though a “representative government in every nation from Gibraltar to India by the close of the decade” would have been more visionary.
Putting Israel on notice the way that Syria and Iran were put on notice, would have been nice as well.
The courage of Iraqis casting votes versus the duty of a citizen to act for the sake of the republic… I don’t know what that means. It means that we will continue to try and cram the actions of people into bit-sized nuggets of infotainment products for consumers. What is more important – democratic republicanism or market capitalism?
Why do we have the spectacle of “special guests”? I think that it’s probably great for them, and some of them likely deserve it, but it politicized whatever makes them special.
Slavery, Fascism, Communism… It’s funny that all of those are ‘victories’ that were accidental… the abolition of slavery wasn’t the goal of the Union invasion of the Confederate States of America; the Nazis were allowed to rise to power in response to the punishment of Germany by the Allies at Versailles and only were an afterthought; fulfilling their treaty obligations in response to the U. S. Declaration of War against the Empire of Japan; and the Cold War came about in much the way the Iraq war did, by ignoring the advice of battlefield generals to attack the Soviets in Europe, in favor of ending the war while we were ahead, and in the end, communism as a political ideology collapsed under its own weight because it was in a fatal relationship with communism as an economic philosophy while simultaneously engaged in a zero-sum game with republicanism married to capitalism – we didn’t win the political game, they lost the economic game. In essence, we stumbled upon these victories as a consequence of aiming at other goals. Union begat emancipation, vengeance begat the destruction of national socialism, capitalism begat the political victory over totalitarianism. Reversing those pairings won’t work.