made to be broken
This ThinkProgress article shows two things that Bush is in favor of recycling: proposals and promises. He makes many statements about “addiction” and “dependence”—concepts with which he should be quite familiar—but he and the Republican rubber-stamp Congress have done nothing for the past six years. Will tonight’s SOTU be more of the same, or will the spectre of oversight from the Democratic Congress force him to take action instead of relying on applause lines?
update (2:15pm):
David Roberts provides a Green Party perspective on the president and the upcoming SOTU at HuffPo:
Bush is reviled. His popularity is yet again at an all-time low in the polls. The American people have rejected him and overwhelmingly rejected his escalation of a disastrous war. His Congressional bootlickers are deserting him in droves. After six years he has no domestic accomplishments to speak of, only a foreign policy disaster of incalculable proportions.His legacy to his party will be failure: Republicans are headed for a drubbing in 2008 that will make 2006 look like pattycakes. His legacy to the next president will be failure: whoever is elected will spend at least a term, possibly two, cleaning up the mess and managing fallout. His legacy to future generations will be failure: the U.S. is in every way less secure than when he took over, more vulnerable to everything from energy shocks to severe weather to terrorism.
He is a failure. A small, vain, vicious man backed into a corner. All his energy now is devoted to one thing: not being the guy who lost the Iraq War. He no longer hopes of winning it. He's just scrambling to stay afloat until he can dump it in his successor's lap. If he has to escalate to keep from losing, don't think he won't provoke Iran. That will be the story of the next two years. [emphasis in original]