01.25.07
The (sad) State of the Union…
When I was a kid, going to school (Yes, there were schools back then, now pipe down!), I was taught that the President’s “State of the Union” address was essentially his yearly “stockholder’s report” to the people of the country.
I’ve gotten a number of stockholder’s reports over the years. It strikes me that most them reported on what has been accomplished over the previous year, the status of ongoing projects, positives and negatives facing the enterprise, and an accounting of how the financials are right now.
A small portion is usually dedicated to future plans, positives and negatives that may be in the path, and a best guess at where the enterprise expects be at the next report. Checkpoints and goals are enunciated so we can observe progress – or lack thereof.
Keep in mind, now, that we, the people, elect our president (and others) to run the company for us, er, I mean run the country for us. They work for us, despite what they seem to think at times.
Because of this, we have every right to expect a yearly accounting of what has been done, what is being done, how the economy is doing and if the expectations from last year’s report have been met.
Instead what we just got from this temporary leader of the country is “none of the above.”
This particular president seems to feel that he is above all that, and that he, and only he, has any right to that information. It would never occur to him that he actually owes us an accounting of his past year’s performance. We pay him to do a job for us, and have every right to expect performance. In his address, there were no past accomplishments, no current progress reports, no listing of objectives met, etc.
We got all sorts of nebulous words telling us what he thinks needs to be accomplished in the future, but all presented without a plan of how to accomplish any of it. No concrete objectives, no goals to be met, no time frames, and certainly no outline of how he, personally, plans to accomplish all those grand sounding phrases. Sound bites is what they are called, I believe.
Trying to wring an honest “State of the Union” address out of this president is a lost cause. He doesn’t feel that he needs to report to us what he has accomplished, what he has failed at, and the current status of works in progress. We are just a bunch of rubes that fund the whole works, while He is “The Decider” and “The Educator.”
No matter if you are a supporter or detractor of the current regime, if you honestly look at the State of the Union address given by it’s leader, you will find it almost totally lacking in ANY hard information on the current state of the union.
Please, please tell me, that with millions and millions of people to chose from, this it NOT the best we can do. If this is the “best,” may God save us all – we are doomed.
Might I make a humble suggestion?
Please vote every chance you get. When you vote, please try to look beyond pretty faces or grand sounding rhetoric, and vote for the person who has a chance to do the best job for us all. We have some very rough years directly ahead, and we need folks in office who are up to the task, and who can see beyond their own over inflated egos to real needs and real solutions. We need people in office, working for us, who can make some hard decisions based on what is best for the country and world as a whole, rather than what might be best for their political party, their friends, and their ego.
Please try to get the best leadership we can, the finest minds, the most intelligent, moral and dedicated to the job at hand that we can find. We don’t have that now and we desperately need to turn this all around.
Thanks for listening.
Tom
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