A Statement on the State (of the Union)

I'm not feeling energetic enough to give Dubya a full review this year, but I'll just say he did an excellent job. Every year he gets better at presenting the State of the Union. I just wish I could have been there.

Our president laid out a confident, clear plan of what needs to happen in Iraq before we leave, the need to modernize social security, the need to vote on judges in the Senate and much more. Of course, he also threw in another nod toward lowering dependence on foreign oil, a push for the Marriage Protection (Constitutional) Amendment and acknowledgment of the need to protect life at every stage.

There was not anything surprising but it was good. It was much more of a nuts-and-bolts domestic issue kind of speech rather than the philosophical champion of freedom style of speech that we had two weeks ago at the Inauguration. That's not to say that Iraq did not get significant attention (or that there weren't some not so veiled threats went out to Syria and Iran), but that international issues were not the main focus of the speech. I expect the big discussion point in the coming days to be Social Security Privatization rather than the “Axis of Evil” or Iraqi Interim government plans, as the discussion went the last two years.

What did you think?