The Foundation

“Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason.” –Benjamin Franklin

The Demo-gogues

To sum up the SOTU: “I went … I know … My … My … I took office … I’m president … I will work … I intend … I will oppose … I want to speak … I took office … I refused … told me … My message … Send me … I’ll sign … I set … I signed … I will go … I will not stand … It’s not fair … I’m announcing … I promise you … I also hear … I want … Join me … My administration … I want to cut … I call on … I spoke … let me put … I believe … my administration … I took office … I will sign … I’m directing … my administration … I’m requiring … I will not walk away … I will not walk away … I will not cede … I will … I’m directing … I’m proud … Send me … I will sign … I’m sending … I’ve approved … my presidency … I’ve ordered … I guess … I’m confident … I will not back down … I will not back down … I will not go back … I will not go back … I’m asking … fair play … So do I … I told … I’m prepared … fair share … my fair share … I get tax breaks I don’t need … I recognize … I bet … I’ve talked … Send me a bill … I will sign … I ask the Senate … I’ve asked … I’m a Democrat … I believe … my education reform … I will keep taking … I can do … I have no doubt … I will take … I’m president … I intend … I have proposed … I have already … I’m proposing … brings me … my proudest … I sat … I look at … I’m reminded.” –BO

The speech also sounded a lot like last year’s.

Bailouts are awesome: “On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. … Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s number one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. … We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.” –Barack Obama

Bailouts are terrible: “It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.” –Barack Obama, later in the same SOTU

Policy based on envy: “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” –Barack Obama

Conciliatory blame throwing: “The state of our union is getting stronger. And we’ve come too far to turn back now. As long as I’m president, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.” –Barack Obama

Deciding how much money you can make: “[W]e need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. … On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up.” –Barack Obama

Elsewhere, in race bait land: “The point I was making is that black people hold the president in such high esteem, that they would not dare march on the White House even though unemployment is at 15 percent and higher and if there was a white president we would do that because we’ve had white presidents since George Washington.” –Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO)

Belly laugh of the week: “[T]his president has reached out as seriously and sincerely as any president with whom I’ve served over the last 30 years, to work together in a bipartisan fashion. No president with whom I’ve served over those last 30 years has spent as much time working with Republicans and Democrats in the room, exchanging ideas, evidencing a willingness to compromise as President Obama has.” –House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD)

Secrets: “[Newt Gingrich is] not going to be president of the United States. That’s not going to happen. Let me just make my prediction and stand by it, it isn’t going to happen. There is something I know. The Republicans, if they choose to nominate him that’s their prerogative. I don’t even think that’s going to happen.” –House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

A Note on the SOTU From Mark Alexander

There was not ONE SINGLE free-market economic remedy mentioned in Obama’s entire teleprompted rhetoric last night – every “solution” was government engineering by way of intervention, regulation or redistribution. Obama ended his recitation asserting, “We should all want a smarter more effective government.” Indeed, on this we should all agree, and to that end, work tirelessly to defeat Obama and his socialist regime.

Read a full analysis from Alexander in tomorrow’s “The State of Disunion.”

Editorial Exegesis

“President Obama delivered a State of the Union address Tuesday night that by the account of his own advisers is more campaign document than a plan for governing. … Normally a President at the start of his fourth year would be running on his record, accentuating the legislation he’s passed. Mr. Obama can’t do that with any specificity because the economic recovery has been so weak and the legislation he has passed is so unpopular. So last night he took credit for the shale gas revolution he had nothing to do with and proposed new policies to ‘spread the wealth around’… Once the Reagan recovery got cooking, in 1983, growth stayed above 5% for 18 months and never fell below 3.3% for 13 consecutive quarters. In the Obama recovery, growth has never exceeded 4% in any quarter and fell off markedly in mid-2010 through the third quarter of 2011. … As he runs for re-election, Mr. Obama is trying to campaign as an incumbent who is striving to help the economy but has been stymied at every turn by Congress. … For two years he had the largest Democratic majorities in Congress since the 1970s and achieved nearly everything he wanted. … Mr. Obama clearly has a spring in his step these days, figuring that the public hates Congress and thinks Republicans run it, that the GOP will field a weak presidential candidate, and that he can fool the public into believing only Mitt Romney’s taxes will rise if Mr. Obama wins a second term. He has only one big obstacle: his record.” –The Wall Street Journal

Upright

“If you want a good distillation of this president’s wrongheaded view of the United States of America, look no further than this rhetorical bit from the end of tonight’s State of the Union address: ‘No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we built it together. This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other’s backs.’ Unity is central to American identity, but not the way Obama envisions it. E pluribus unum is not Latin for, ‘Hey, bro, let’s invest in some infrastructure together.’ The notion that this nation is one big team that acts collectively toward shared goals set by the state would be completely foreign to the men who founded it. But that is Obama’s concept of America.” –columnist Andrew Cline

“Has Barack Obama learned nothing in three years? Last night, during his State of the Union address, he promised ‘a blueprint for an economy.’ But economies are crushed by blueprints. An economy is really nothing more than people participating in an unfathomably complex spontaneous network of exchanges aimed at improving their material circumstances. It can’t even be diagrammed, much less planned. And any attempt at it will come to grief. Politicians like Obama believe they are the best judges of how we should conduct our lives. Of course a word like ‘blueprint’ would occur to the president. He, like most who want his job, aspires to be the architect of a new society. But we who love our lives and our freedom say: No, thanks. We need no social architect. We need liberty under law. That’s it.” –columnist John Stossel

“If you wonder why unemployment is so high in the U.S., check out the brain-dead economics in the SOTU address. People with high incomes pay lower taxes because an optimal tax policy taxes consumption not income. While our code is not optimal, it tilts in that direction. I doubt that Warren Buffett understands that the ‘Buffett Rule’ is economically illiterate, and marks him for all of history, after posterity forgets his billions, as an ignorant rube who pushed the U.S. toward inefficient tax policy. I doubt that President Obama understands that the academic community that previously embraced him will have a hard time maintaining the fiction that he is a significant intellectual when he decides to jettison decades of academic literature in favor of a populist Hail Mary pass that is indefensible.” –American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett

“By many measures, Barack Obama has left the State of the Union in tatters, but the liberal media, led by the highly rated Big Three network (ABC, CBS, NBC) news shows, have attempted to cover up those holes in the Union by mostly ignoring the Obama administration’s greatest failings. From record numbers of people on food stamps, to the administration’s support of failed energy companies while rejecting an oil pipeline that would result in thousands of jobs, the Big Three networks haven’t told their viewers the full story of Obama’s pathetic track record.” –Media Research Center’s Geoffrey Dickens

Insight

“Politicians never accuse you of ‘greed’ for wanting other people’s money – only for wanting to keep your own money.” –columnist Joseph Sobran (1946-2010)

“If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too.” –English playwright and author W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

Dezinformatsia

Missing the point: “There’s a tremendous amount of cynicism in Gingrich’s use of food stamps because of what he actually knows that his Republican debate audiences do not know. His Republican audiences do not know that most people on food stamps are white.” –MSNBC’s Lawrence O'Donnell

The BIG Lie: “George W. Bush had more people on food stamps, not this president.” –MSNBC’s Martin Bashir

Twisted question: “Do you really believe, in every case, it should be totally wrong, in the sense that – I know that you believe, even in cases of rape and incest – and you’ve got two daughters. You know, if you have a daughter that came to you who had been raped and was pregnant and was begging you to let her have an abortion – would you really be able to look her in the eye and say, no, as her father?” –CNN host Piers Morgan to GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum

Gun Grabbers: “[I]t would be a disservice to [Rep. Gabrielle Gifford’s] life and that of the others directly affected by [the Tucson tragedy], and tragedies like it, to ignore the factors that precipitated the violence: the easy access to guns; the availability of accessories such as extended clips that make deadly weapons all the more lethal; and a porous and shoddy regulatory system that too often fails to keep these weapons out of the hands of dangerous or dangerously unstable individuals. Mr. Obama last year delivered his State of the Union just weeks after the Tucson massacre and in the presence of victims’ family members. Yet he, like so many politicians intimidated by the gun lobby’s muscle, could not muster a single word about the need for reasonable gun control measures to ward off such violence in the future. Perhaps he will find the courage to speak up this year, as Ms. Giffords looks on during her last State of the Union as a member of Congress.” –Washington Post editorial

Newspulper Headlines:

It Had to Happen Eventually: “The End of ‘Inevitability’” –the American Spectator website

We Blame George W. Bush: “Obama on Keystone XL: Blame Hillary!” –WeeklyStandard.com

Questions Nobody Is Asking: “Voters Know Gingrich Talks a Good Game, but Can He Dance?” –Washington Times website

Breaking News From 2009, 2010, 2011: “Obama Hurting With Swing Voters, Poll Shows” –Politico.com

Bottom Story of the Day: “Obama Plans Three-Day Campaign Trip After State of the Union Speech” –DailyCaller.com

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

Village Idiots

Energy = crime: “Our children and grandchildren will judge those who have misled the public, allowing fossil fuel emissions to continue almost unfettered, as guilty of crimes against humanity and nature. But the eventual conviction of these people in the court of public opinion will do little to ease the burdens that will have been created for today’s young people and future generations.” –James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Dodge City: “[T]he president’s background as a community organizer is well documented in the president’s own books, so his experience in that field obviously contributed to who he is today. But his experience is a broad-based one that includes a lot of other areas in his life.” –White House spokesman Jay Carney

Embellishment: “[T]he president’s commitment to job creation has been amply demonstrated by the policies that he has pursued, that he has signed into law, that have contributed considerably to the creation of 3.2 million private sector jobs.” –Jay Carney

“We’re just going to support what we like to call ‘universal values’ – not American values, not Western values, universal values.” –Michael McFaul, Obama’s new U.S. ambassador to Russia, when asked about democracy in Russia

Short Cuts

“Pittsburgh medical researchers discovered Tuesday that a person’s adult stem cells could possibly be used to make them grow younger. Many doctors have been tinkering with it. Ron Paul has used it on his supporters for years and now they all look twenty-five.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“Warren Buffett now says that his offer to help pay down the national debt was merely ‘symbolic.’ Ah … sorta like an Obama ‘stimulus’ program.” –Fred Thompson

“[E]very President’s SOTU speeches follows a very predictable pattern: 1. The State of the Union is strong. 2. Applause. 3. It’s stronger because I’m up here and you’re not. 4. Applause. 5. Attack the Supreme Court [Obama only]. 6. Here’s why my political party is awesome. 7. Applause from one side of room. 8. Here’s why the other party is a bunch of doody-heads. 9. Applause from the same side of the room. 10. Here’s a program I want you to pass. 11. Applause. 12. Here’s an Ordinary Average Guy whose story should convince you to pass my program. 13. Television shot of Ordinary Average Guy. 14. Applause. 15. Repeat steps 6-14 about 874 times. 16. Here’s a couple more reasons why I’m awesome. 17. Applause.” –blogger Ed Morrissey

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team