President Bush’s State of the Union address was subdued, pleading, and resigned. He came across like a man who was glad that he had only one more of these left to deliver. The domestic “initiatives” were delivered with the sincerity and commitment of a lounge lizard. In his response, Senator Jim Webb right to wonder if the president was even serious about them. If the White House develops a single piece of legislation addressing any of the domestic issues raised by the president, it will be -- as Howard Cosell used to put it -- a major story.
In fact, most notable in the domestic portion was what the president didn’t say. In last year’s speech, he sounded a clarion call of resolve for the beleaguered Gulf Coast:
A hopeful society comes to the aid of fellow citizens in times of suffering and emergency -- and stays at it until they're back on their feet.
This year, he made no mention of Hurricane Katrina. Zero, zip, zed. Nil, nada. Bupkes. Katrina? What Katrina? Thus, he gave his imprimatur to the malign neglect of the bereft citizens of New Orleans. It’s as if they’ve disappeared from view.
On Iraq, he predictably recycled the same tired points. As ever, his premise is so faulty as to render his logic irrelevant. For instance, it’s not at all clear that Iraq is ground zero of a “decisive ideological struggle.” Even the president appears unconvinced on that score. If this much is indeed at stake, then how can our commitment be anything less than open-ended? And yet, he assures us that it is not. If we are facing Armageddon, then why is the country not on a war footing? Why are sacrifices limited to military families? Surely under such dire circumstances, American citizens would be happy to pony up taxes to fund the struggle and accept conservation measures. In fact, if these are not forthcoming, isn’t the struggle something less than decisive?
Moreover, the president has always been murky on what the competing ideologies are. Unlike communism or fascism, terror is not an ideology: It is a tactic to advance a goal. If the president thinks that the goal is to replace American democracy with something else, he’s never explained what the something else is. Is it to transform the United States into an Islamic republic? That’s more laughable and less likely than the most paranoid Red Scare fantasies of Joseph McCarthy. Is it to spread radical Islamicism across the Middle East? If that’s the case, how has the Iraq war inhibited that? However loathsome he may have been, Saddam Hussein ran a secular operation hostile to Islamicism. Now, the torrents of extremism are held back only by the thin, cracking dike of American troops, who are aggravating the situation by their mere presence.
The truth is, the president wants the troop escalation because he needs it to run out the clock on his presidency, after which he can hand off the mess to the next guy. When the neocons raise the question of “who lost Iraq," George Bush wants the moving finger of blame to point away from him. That this might cause the deaths and maiming of more American sons and daughters is beside the point. Anyway, he doesn’t have a dog in that hunt.