State of the Union

There is a television show called “State of the Union” on CNN.

It’s not doing very well in the ratings.

Just like the country.

The president is going to step into the House Chamber with approval ratings as
high as he has had in a long time, at least according to CNN. They would know.
They know ratings.

Obama’s approval ratings have steadily increased through no fault of his own.
He gave in to Republicans on the whole tax deal at the end of last year, he
made some empty promises on the regulatory front, and he hired Bill Daley to
run the White House for him.

Oh, and he gave a great speech in Tucson, Ariz., in the aftermath of the Gabby
Giffords shooting. The speech looked even better in contrast to Sarah Palin,
who released a videotape that was, well, silly.

The president is going to give his remarks tonight, and then he is going to
face two rebuttals. One from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), which will be terrific,
and one from Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.).

Michele Bachmann? Yes, she is the new head of the Tea Party Caucus. Her role is
to make both Ryan and Obama look really good. And I am sure she will do a good
job.

The Tea Party doesn’t quite trust the Republican Party yet, and I am pretty
certain that the feeling in mutual.  But
one thing Republicans and Tea Partiers probably agree on is spending. Going
back to turn of the last century, the Republican Party has been against
spending (except on the military). Joe Cannon hated spending. So did Calvin
Coolidge. And Robert Taft. And Barry Goldwater. And Ronald Reagan. And Newt
Gingrich.

George W. Bush gets a bad rap on his spending. You take away the prescription
drug law (which was the cheaper alternative), and Bush didn’t increase
discretionary non-defense spending very much. He did increase spending on
defense, though, especially homeland defense. But he didn’t use the war as an
excuse to cut spending in other places, and he really should have. Not once did
President Bush put out a press release bragging about how much money he cut
from the budget. Not once.

We are going broke as a nation, partially because Bush didn’t cut spending when
he had the chance, but mostly because President Obama and Nancy Pelosi had a
party at the taxpayers’ expense for the last two years.

The breadth and depth of the Obama/Pelosi spending spree is just stunning, all
in the name of dealing with the financial crisis. I still don’t get how you
deal with a debt crisis by going deeper in debt. Maybe Paul Krugman could
explain that to me one day.

But I digress. The president’s spending spree inspired Glenn Beck to inspire
the Tea Party. If you ask Glenn Beck about the state of the union, he would say
we are all doomed. Doomed, I tell you. Doomed, unless you listen to me and
follow me and do exactly as I say.

Beck scares me a little bit. But I guess that is all part of his routine. He is
like some sort of Bela Lugosi movie. He aims to scarily entertain. And he is
good at it.

My dream is that Beck and Keith Olbermann (the recently canned provocateur from
the left) would form their own television network, which would culminate every
night in a mud-wrestling match. I think that would be awesome.

Once again, I digress.

Back to the State of the Union. The funny thing is that towns and counties and
cities and states are going bankrupt all around the country, and that has very
little to do with the federal government. They are all going broke because they
have all given very generous pensions to all of their former employees, be they
firemen or teachers or police officers or other government employees, and they
can’t afford them anymore. But they don’t have the will or legal authority to
take the money back.

You can’t really let people retire at close to their full salary at the age of
57 and then have them live to 90. Thirty-three years of getting paid to do
nothing is, well, not fair to the taxpayers. And it makes no sense financially,
either.

The media is going to focus on all of the bells and whistles of the president’s
speech. They are going to dish on who is sitting next to whom, as if any of
that made any difference to anybody outside the Beltway.

In the meantime, we are going broke. That is the true state of the union. Sad
but true.