Several readers have written to ask me why I haven't commented on President Obama's State of the Union (SOTU) address on Wednesday.
Well, firstly, I didn't listen to it, though I have read the transcript and watched a few of the video clips. The SOTU has evovled into a choreographed and essentially meaningless platform wherein the President (a) claims credit for everything under the sun, and (b) promises everything else under the sun. The credit taken is usually false, the promises hardly ever attempted, much less kept. I fully expected Obama to exceed all of his predecessors in the preceding, and in that I was not disappointed.
What did surprise me was the number and magnitude of the outright fabrications in his address. Most of these are simple matters of fact, readily checked. He's already being called on these errors of fact by many observers, including even some of the most liberal commentators around. There's no doubt that Obama knew these statements were lies, so that means they must be deliberate and – sadly – he must believe that he can get away with them. In other words, he thinks the American public is so stupid and so ill-informed that they won't realize he's lying to them.
Based on a small sample of friends and colleagues I've talked with, Obama is badly mistaken on this point. His SOTU address pissed off a lot of people, and disgusted even more. You can count me amongst the latter; I was already pissed off before the SOTU...
