The state of the union? It's great if you happen to be wealthy, particularly the wealthiest one percent or so. If you're a high-rolling Republican campaign donor, or in the executive ranks of a Big Oil or Big Pharma or Big Military/Industrial Complex corporation, or otherwise one of the Bush administration's cronies, it's high times in America.
The president and his ilk continue to point to macroeconomic measures, like the GDP and the unemployment rate, to support their contention that the economy is in good shape. They don't mention that the growth in the GDP reflects the explosion of income in the upper echelons of personal wealth only, and not across the board economic health. They don't mention the fact that the unemployment rate is only as low as it is because of the millions of former workers who have dropped out of the labor market completely. They don't mention that job growth during the latter Bush years has not made up for the job losses in the early years, coupled with the normal expansion of the labor force due to population growth. They don't tell you that the jobs being created pay significantly less than those that were lost, especially the manufacturing and tech jobs that have been sent overseas, subsidized at taxpayer expense.
They continue to tout those macroeconomic measures precisely because they don't account for what most middle-class folks already know: that the Bush economy is a miserable failure for the vast majority of Americans, that the Bush administration has been all about giving aid to those who need it least.
Homeland security is a joke, of course. Emergency preparedness continues to be a laughingstock. The federal government has abandoned any pretense of promoting the general welfare of the people. Even in the aftermath of the disastrous response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, nothing is being done to address this. Meanwhile, enormous resources are devoted to illegal domestic spying programs and other initiatives whose only purpose seems to be to weaken if not destroy the protections of our Constitution.
If the Bush administration's domestic policy is nearly catastrophic, their foreign policy is completely so. Half a trillion American dollars and over 3000 American lives have been wasted on the fraud that is the Iraq war. The evidence is overwhelming that the Bush people sold the war on what they knew to be falsehoods, and with the last election, the American people finally started waking up to this fact. Yet still we are faced with fighting Bush to keep him from sending even more American soldiers over there.
Meanwhile, our allies continue to desert us (who can blame them?) and our standing in the world continues to deteriorate. We've done nothing to curb terrorism and have in fact created a hotbed of terrorism and chaos where there was none before, in Iraq.
Things are looking up, however. With the new Democratic majority in Congress, there is at least the prospect of some oversight, some reining in of and accountability for the out of control Bush administration. Long overdue reforms are under way. Legislation to reverse many of the misdeeds and corporate giveaways of the former Republican Congress has been passed. The House may be able to stop the escalation in Iraq by withholding funds for it. The impeachable offenses by the Bush cabal may soon be investigated, and with any luck, we might soon be free of the madness of King George.