And Now For A Different Take On The SOTU…

I feel dirty; I planned to ignore the speech tonight because I already knew what Obama was going to say (I got the text beforehand) and I saw no benefit in pasting that smug face over top of the words I knew would be spewing from that shit-eaten puss. Alas, my mom – 80 and almost deaf – needed… simply HAD… to watch, and I had to yell back whatever she missed (which was damn near all of it). So – listening, and then screaming out loud what I heard – I’m drained. I feel like a hooker on a Sunday morning after a shoe salesman’s convention, and I need to go find my happy place.

So I’ll make this quick.

Tonight we heard a US President tell the American people… his employers… that an end to the the Founders’ definition of personal freedoms and individual liberties, a clamp-down on self-control & self-determination of our personal property, and a destruction of the free market system were all just the things the doctor ordered for America to become once again all that she can be. We were told that he has singlehandedly ended two wars he relentlessly argued against, adding that these wars have made us stronger (facts and reality on the ground notwithstanding).

He took credit for producing more energy within the US than any past President, having opened up more land and more drilling opportunities than anyone in history and he promised us that our dependence on foreign oil was at historic lows (facts and reality on the ground notwithstanding).

He took credit for killing bin Laden (fair enough… it WAS on his watch) and used the symbiosis among members of the kill team to suggest that Congress should be more like soldiers; fight together for the sake of the mission, and remain ever-faithful to the people for whom they fight. He smoothly skipped over who he believes Congress should be fighting for, exactly, letting us think he meant the American people… even though his context surely represented those IN Congress trying to save their own damn mission… the mission of staying in power and staying elected.

There was a time not so long ago that I would be calling this the first in a series of articles in which I take on the President and these clowns we refer to as our duly elected Representatives. But that was the old me. That was the guy that ate a little broken glass for breakfast with a gasoline chaser just to get in the right frame of mind for getting… and STAYING… pissed off.

That guy is dead; there’s no point in getting worked up over this crap anymore. Nobody listens and nobody cares. Everyone’s gone all American Idol in the world of politics, and all that matters is who gets elected and who gets sent home…. and who among the pundits out there called it first and called it right. And none of what they do (or do NOT do) in between elections even matters any more.

Think I’m whining? Ask yourself whether or not one of the earliest comments from Shieffer should give you pause, or make your head bob up and down uncontrollably:

“It’s an election year… no major legislation will happen this year.”

If you’re like the old haystack, your head should have exploded. If you’re like the new, recovering politiholic haystack, you just bobbed it up and down a couple times and threw back another cold one.

Much of what Obama said tonight will not get done, and no one expects otherwise. Everyone will blame everyone else for none of it getting done, and none of us, honestly, expects otherwise. All of the shit that’s bad now will still be bad come election night 2012… or it will be worse… and no one expects otherwise.

On election night, some folks are going to win and some are going to lose… and either of the POTUS choices will be very much the same, in all the bad ways, as the other. The prevailing opinion, be it from the left OR the right, is that Government has a role to play in our lives and it ought to do better (the problem, of course, is that “do better” is code for “get bigger and infringe more”). The only real choice for us in picking between them is which will do the least harm; the days of hiring saviors is long gone, having been replaced with days of hiring chump caretakers with no better way to spend their lives than to sit in Washington DC and do nothing while getting a hot salary and benefits none of the riff raff out here will ever see.

And we’ll all keep paying them to keep doing nothing because it’s just what we do. Tonight’s speech sets the tone for the next 40 plus weeks, and I’m already exhausted. Think I’ll take up drinking… look how it’s working out for my employees.