The State of the Union

By Aussiegirl

There were purple fingers raised all over the House Chamber tonight as President Bush delivered an eloquent and far-reaching State of the Union address. He's always best when he can look his audience in the eye and judge reaction, and he was on the top of his form today. He spoke decisively, with deep sincerity and with great conviction and passion. Many congressmen and others had dipped their fingers in purple ink to stand in solidarity with the symbol of the Iraqi election.

And I'm sure that probably for the first time in the history of the State of the Union, Ukraine was mentioned not once, but twice, along with Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Territories as places where recent democratic elections had taken place.

For sheer writing - I preferred this plain spoken yet powerful speech to the more high flung and poetic inaugural speech. But that is just picking nits. This style just fit him more, in my opinion, and it sounded more like him, and as a consequence I think it was even more powerful -- at least to this observer. I know there have been differing opinions on that.

But surely, the most gut-wrenching and heartrending moment of all had to be when President Bush introduced the mother and father of a young marine who gave his life in the defense of liberty in Iraq in the assault on Fallujah -- and the woman seated in front of the mother, an Iraqi freedom advocate whose own father was assassinated by Saddam, embraced her. The two women hugged and sobbed as the audience applauded for a full several minutes. If there was a dry eye in the house it could only have belonged to a cynical and hard-hearted democrat (Hillary Clinton comes to mind -- and Nancy Pelosi too, who if she ever shed a tear did so only because her wide-eyed over-face-lifted lids have probably not closed since the year 2000.)

The most controversial proposal predictably seemed to be his proposal to overhaul Social Security. When the President put forth the forecast that Social Security will be bankrupt in some year in the future, some democrats in the hall yelled out rudely in disagreement. I was appalled. This is not the British House of Commons, where heckling and booing seems to have been honed to a fine art, something I find exceedingly strange in that country where manners are prized so highly. I thought it was outrageous that the democrats actually heckled the President during the State of the Union address. Surely a low point in decorum and the public discourse in our country. But it is hardly surprising as the democrats seem to have lost any sense of shame that they ever may have possessed, and have moved into total rage mode.

As Tom Delay just said, they have become the party of the "no". No plans, no policies or agenda, simply saying "no" to everything and every idea.

Unfortunately the President is still sticking by his guest worker program as a fix-all for the staggering illegal immigration problem. Without securing the borders and dealing with all the illegal immigrants who still pour over our borders every day, and who will continue to stream over regardless of any well-meaning guest worker program, the problem will only get worse. This entire problem will require another whole essay, so we'll leave it for now.

He touched on a number of domestic issues such as education, taxes and health reform and on the international sphere, his determination that the dream of extending democracy and freedom to more and more nations of the world is an achievable dream -- just as achievable in our lifetimes as the dream of defeating Fascism or Communism once seemed.

With the recent Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and now the "Purple Finger" revolution in Iraq, the world does seem to be setting off into a colorful future of expanded freedom. Let us pray it may be so.

Read the complete transcript here.