It's Strong? What A Surprise

Rejected State of the Union Speech: “We all know we’re not going to do anything, so who’s up for Scrabble?”  

Today's rant is not sponsored by Hasbro.  Why not?  How about it, Hasbro?

So last night was the big State of the Union speech.   It was the single most important State of the Union speech since last year's, which was the single most important State of the Union speech since the year before that.  You get the idea.  It was a speech.  I didn't watch it.  

More importantly, I didn't watch the increasingly ridiculous parade of response speeches given by the other political party.  This nonsense started fairly recently, in 1966.  Now, it apparently includes a Spanish-language version of the response (by the party interested in deporting immigrants) because they don't get enough of the Spanish-speaking vote, a third response by the extreme fringe of the opposition party, and an online-only response by another guy in the extreme fringe who didn't get picked to give the official extreme fringe response and felt like he didn't get enough TV time.  This is a lot of work to respond to a single speech that accomplishes roughly nothing.  

The net of both speeches is as follows...and please keep in mind, I didn't watch them.  The president wants certain things to happen.  The opposition party claims that those things will destroy America, The American People(tm) don't want them, so they're going to stop the president from doing those things.  In return, they will provide a remarkably limited number of their own ideas (83% of which will be in the form of a Voucher Program), and the other party doesn't want those things because they will destroy America, and The American People(tm) don't want them.  As a result, nothing will happen, but plenty of TV time will be devoted to talking about how nothing is happening and who is to blame and why they should be voted out of office in the 2014 election, and more importantly, the 2016 election.  

In the meantime, all of these people will have jobs and get face time on TV and be on talk radio programs and make campaign trips instead of actually doing...you know...work.  That's okay, because we've actually come to expect that...which brings me to my main point.  

The president knows he's not going to get anything accomplished this year.  Congress knows they're not going to get anything accomplished this year.  We all know that neither of them are going to get anything accomplished this year.  So why go through the exercise of telling us what you want to accomplish this year?  Lose the stupid facade already and just admit that you have no expectations of any real accomplishments.  At least that way, none of you will be lying and need to go on TV incessantly to tell me how the other one is lying.  I stopped listening long ago.