My Reaction To Obama’s Non-State Of The Union — State Of The Union Speech

by John Hawkins | February 24, 2009 10:42 pm

First off, I didn’t live blog on RWN, nor did I intend to do so on Twitter[1], but the comments just poured out of me as I listened to that President jerkface blather on. Here were my comments in order,

My economic agenda will provide a rainbow in every pot and a kitten riding a unicorn for every child!. — Barack Obama

There will be sweet orphaned children without puppies and gumdrop houses unless we spend TRILLIONS MORE! — Barack Obama

This time, when we waste your money wrecking the banking industry, there will be more accountability for the bankers! — Barack Obama

Didn’t Barack Obama strongly support the TARP program he now says helped banks, but didn’t help people?

In the midst of the civil war, we laid railroad tracks. Today, we’ll spend trillions to buy snow cone makers for unions.

ACORN will be able to break into 1000s of new houses and bureaucrats will be able to file millions of new forms — all because of the stimulus!

This is America. We don’t do what’s easy — or smart — or sustainable. Not when I’m President at least. — Barack Obama

11 million American children, many of them whose parents can barely afford sports cars, now have health care because of me. — Obama

Now Obama is going to cure cancer. Does that happen before or after he rolls back the oceans?

Nothing like a huge army of government bureaucrats and hundreds of thousands of new regulations to decrease the cost of health care.

By 2020, we will have the highest # of college graduates in the world, because we will make it illegal not to go or to flunk students.

Wow, Obama has found 2 billion dollars in savings over the next 10 years, which should almost make up for the money he’ll waste this year.

You get $8 a week, we raise taxes on the “rich” a trillion dollars, and our children go broke. See? Everybody’s happy!

Our armed forces have our “unyielding support,” if by “unyielding support” you mean we’re going to screw you over at every opportunity — BO

If Iran laughing at us and bowing to China constitutes a “new era of engagement,” we’re already there.

Our children are going to smother us to death in our sleep if we start bragging about how we “performed” in the Obama era

Long story short, this was another campaign speech — well, a campaign speech if say, Lenin were our President.

Obama is essentially planning to radically socialize our country, make the most enormous expansion of government in history, drop to his knees and apologize to the world — and yet, he’s going to slash spending and be tough on terrorists at the same time.

In other words, we essentially have an off-the-charts liberal, who wants to radically change our country, promising everything to everybody and counting on the mainstream media to keep the American people in the dark about the enormity of the changes he’s making and the fact that he can’t possibly keep his contrasting promises.

Summary: Happy feel good pap with a surprising number of minor stumbles. That being said, he sounded better than Bush and the media still has that tingle going up their leg. He’ll get a good grade from the media and maybe a small, temporary bounce. On substance, it gets a Hammer and a Sickle though. This guy is laying out a formula that will quite literally destroy our country’s future with a layer of frosting on top.

Bobby Jindal’s response: I thought Jindal was good, but not great. He was a bit wooden at first and didn’t hit the Democrats as hard as I would have liked. That said, he got better as he went on, was optimistic, had some really good stories, and offered some real options on tax care, health care, and schools. He also laid down a real marker on spending.

Summary: B. Americans will like this guy and what he had to say, but his speaking style wasn’t quite there.

PS: The very early conservative reaction to Jindal’s speech that I’ve seen has been very negative — I think way too negative. I could be wrong, but personally I think that’s because political junkies tend to get too caught up in zingers and delivery. Not that those things don’t matter, but wonks tend to give it way too much importance. Jindal was optimistic, good on substance, and I think the average voter will have a positive reaction to him personally and to what he said. That doesn’t mean it was a legendary response, but it was serviceable and we could have done a lot worse.