Ryan McFarland's blog

The State of the Union

zieak ♦ January 20, 2004 ♦ 1 Comment

I have a few thoughts about the address made by the President tonight.

“Americans are proving once again to be the hardest working people in the world.” Does anyone actually believe this? I bet Americans are among the laziest workers. I bet we spend more time doing personal stuff at work than any other nation. I bet we outsource more of our actual labor to “developing” countries, illegal immigrants, and anyone else willing to actually work – especially for less money. Now, I don’t have any statistics to back up my assumptions. But I definitely do not think Americans are the hardest working people in the world.

“We have not come all this way through tragedy, and trial, and war only to falter and leave our work unfinished.” That sounds to me like a stab at Bush’s father. Family squabbles should be kept out of the State of the Union and the dinner table.

“Inside the United States, where the war began, we must continue to give homeland security and law enforcement personnel every tool they need to defend us.” The problem I have here is “where the war began” since I think anyone who has done any studying or asked “Why did they fly those planes into those buildings?” knows that Osama had been long at war with the US. This is like saying Pearl Harbor was where World War II began. Both were when the war finally hit the general public – at least emotionally.

“As part of the offensive against terror, we are also confronting the regimes that harbor and support terrorists, and could supply them with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. “ So, if we could travel through time would we be confronting ourselves for supplying Osama with weapons and training?

“Since we last met in this chamber, combat forces of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Poland and other countries enforced the demands of the United Nations, ended the rule of Saddam Hussein and the people of Iraq are free.” Did he just claim that our war with Iraq was meeting the “demands of the United Nations”? Isn’t it true that Congress now eats “Freedom Fries” because France (among other nations) refused to support our militaristic proposals for intervention in Iraq?

“We are dealing with these thugs in Iraq, just as surely as we dealt with Saddam Hussein’s evil regime.” I have issues with labeling anything as “evil”. Saddam called the US evil. Osama calls us evil too. So it is a matter of perspective. One of evil’s definitions includes the term “morally reprehensible” so some churches would consider homosexuality “evil” while other churches obviously do not. I would like to think that America’s mainstream religious institutions would be the expert on things that are “morally reprehensible”. Certainly the Catholic Church has been learning a painful lesson about it with their priests providing plenty of scandals. But i digress. Episcopalians selected an openly gay man as the Bishop in New Hampshire. So is it possible that homosexuality is not as “morally reprehensible” as it once was? So let’s leave subjective descriptions out of our stereotypes of other rulers or nations.

“America is committed to keeping the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous regimes.” This is such a good idea. The only thing we need to do is identify the “most dangerous regimes”. I’d say that in order to be dangerous the “regime” (defined as simply “a form of government” but almost always carrying a negative connotation) would have to have a recent history of attacking other nations or a high potential for attacking other nations. I’m pretty sure that would put the United States and Great Britain at the top of that list. Israel seems to do an awful lot of it too – but we gave them their dangerous weapons.

On Iraq – “Had we failed to act, the dictator’s weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day.” Um… didn’t we stop looking for those weapons of mass destruction a few weeks ago? We went to Iraq to free the people. We went to Iraq to overthrow a dictator. We went to Iraq to protect America. (From a nation without the technology to attack us.) I think overthrowing Saddam was a good move. He sure did some bad stuff. But i’m really getting tired of the lies about our need to protect ourselves from this “evil” man. It seems to me that we’re the nation that invaded theirs twice in the last 15 years. Our “national defense” provided an excellent “national offense” and succeeded in killing perhaps thousands of civilians and fortunately no American civilians were harmed in the protection of American freedom.

About France and Germany’s veto in the UN- “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people.” Apparently we’ll never seek a permission slip to attack a nation that offers no threat to the security of our people either.

“We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.” Maybe not an “empire” – they always seem to fall. Like it or not, desire or not, we do dominate.

“This nation will not go back to the days of simply shuffling children along from grade to grade without them learning the basics.” I wish I went to schools that just shuffled me from grade to grade. School would have been much easier. Maybe this was a comment about schools in Texas where I presume most of President Bush’s experience lies.

“Much of our job growth will be found in high-skilled fields like health care and biotechnology.” and “I propose increasing our support for America’s fine community colleges, so they can train workers for the industries that are creating the most new jobs.” So it sort of sounds like I can go to a community college and get a degree in biotechnology and then get a job right away. I looked up “biotechnology” and Merriam-Webster defines it as “biological science when applied especially in genetic engineering and recombinant DNA technology”. Yeah. Community Colleges with degrees in genetic engineering.

“Consumers and businesses need reliable supplies of energy to make our economy run so I urge you to pass legislation to modernize our electricity system, promote conservation, and make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy.” So we can get all of our oil from Texas.

“Amazing medical technologies are improving and saving lives.” I’d like to know which medical technologies are amazing to the president. He sounds like an articulate aborigine on his first visit to a hospital.

Same-sex marriage – “Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives.” Yeah. That was built into the Constitution. It is called “checks and balances”.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Bush has done some remarkable things as President. His surprise trip to Iraq on Thanksgiving Day was perhaps the most significant action i have seen him make. Don’t confuse me with a Democrat either. Frankly i’m very tired of the bipartisan bickering that consumes legislative sessions instead of creating laws for the benefit of the people.

Moon phase

zieak ♦ January 19, 2004 ♦ Leave Your Comment

The current phase of the moon.

“Terror” level

zieak ♦ January 19, 2004 ♦ Leave Your Comment

Add the current terrorism threat level to your site. The below samples
are showing the actual current terror threat – as is the example to the
left. You have three sizes to choose from:

large 212×72

medium 168×50

and small 110×26

All you need to do is paste this code into your site:

<img src="http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage?size=medium" width="168" height="50">

and replace "medium" with "small" or "large", define the image’s height and width. (Right click on the image and select "properties" to find its dimensions. I listed the dimensions of the images above.)