Shorter SOTU: Fear mongering, blah, blah, blah, terra, terra, terra, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
The strangest moment in the State of the Union to me had to have been Bush’s call for the line item veto. It’s been a while, so I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but hasn’t that already been tried? As I recall, the LIV was given to the President during the Clinton administration and then struck down by the Supreme Court. Wikipedia agrees with me:
The President of the United States was briefly granted this power by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996, passed by Congress in order to control "pork barrel spending" that favors a particular region rather than the nation as a whole. The line-item veto was used 82 [1] [2] times by President Bill Clinton before U.S. District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan decided on February 12, 1998 that unilateral amendment or repeal of only parts of statutes violated the U.S. Constitution. This ruling was subsequently affirmed on June 25, 1998 by a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Clinton v. City of New York.
Bush asked for the LIV as if it were some new idea. Weird.
Jim, no longer irritating me, has the SOTU play-by-play.
Update: Tom Tomorrow translates the SOTU into Pirate. Now I get what Bush was trying to say.
1 comment:
I listened to the analysis of Bush's SOTU address on BBC World Service Radio. (Couldn't bear to watch or listen to it live, in its entirety.) The BBC folks spoke in their tired, sardonic tone, as if to say, Been there done that; and sounded slightly amused at some of the rhetoric. On the other hand, the talking heads of the US MSM we all afluster with praise and empty effusiveness. Meanwhile, the US military keeps on killing and killing around the world.
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