State of the Union

Well I watched pretty much the whole speech. (First time I've missed a minute of it in years, but that Duke/Wake Forest matchup was a good one.) I thought Bush did a decent job of explaining the Social Security problem, and obviously there will be one, no matter what Paul Krugman says. 25 years from now there will be several million Baby Boomers slowly wasting away in front of their televisions with artificial organs in their torsos and new vaccines in their veins. And their daily lives, to say nothing of the organs, will be financed by the part of my paycheck I'm not getting today. When my genetically modified body is 145 do you think I'll still be collecting? No sir. So yes, we have to do something, but it will take more than the modest introduction of private accounts for young people. And obviously there was nothing exciting or inspiring about this section of the speech.

The second half was wonderful. Not even the speech itself so much as the 100% new context in which to speak about Iraq.

There was a time when Americans openly took a certain amount of pride in the Iraq project, but the run-up to the 2004 election took the wind out of that sail. To say nothing of the tragedy and discouragement dealt regularly in large doses by the insurgency. Howard Dean started railing against the war, went to the lead in the polls, and the chase to critique most fervently was on. Most have forgotten that before the Dean rhetoric and poll surge Democrats had given up on the Presidency for 2004. The serious contenders (e.g. Hillary) were waiting for 2008 when there was a legitimate chance. Plenty changed, and Dean's angry criticism rang more and more true as the news got more discouraging. The frenzy of self-critique that eventually fell after the intial Dean Domino left behind a trail of best-selling books, splashy headlines, and sober news editorials on the corruptness, errancy, and ineptitude of the Bush administration. They were the most ignorant and dishonest pack of people that ever got to use the White House as office space. The worst Presidency in our lifetime. That's how far we got from mid 2003 to late 2004--unbeatable president became the worst of the past century.

But now the election is over. The eyes of the main stream media are a little less wild; their mouths a bit less frothy. The pictures of ink-stained fingers could almost make you cry. The fact that a liberated Iraqi woman sat next to the President's wife was beautiful. To watch her long, meaningful embrace of a mother whose son had died in the effort to secure her voting rights was profound and powerful. Perhaps I'm a sucker but that was the most beautiful and stirring snapshot I've ever seen in American politics: the mother of the dead marine, sobbing and holding the liberated Iraqi woman, next to the First Lady. I almost lost it when she put her son's dog tags around the woman's wrist at the end.

Historians will debate the worthiness of the loss of life, but it is beautiful to see that our military has done something good. It would be wrong to blame Democrats for making the military look bad. Abu Ghraib was more devastating to perception of the war than any campaign argument. We were rightly ashamed as a country. But how wonderful that the thousands of other soldiers who never debased themselves by humiliating the powerless had the opportunity to see the joy of the Iraqi people on election day and see the fruits of something GOOD they had done. And how beautiful that last night a poignant glimpse of that accomplishment could be seen in the halls of our nation's capitol.