State of the Union

My fellow Americans, let’s not kid ourselves, the state of the union sucks. Sucks! I know I’m supposed to roar here like some frat-boy nationalist grunting a semi-human huu-ah, paramilitary style, but we need to get real. We need to cut the crap for once. Eight years of Republican rule virtually destroyed this nation, and that was preceded by the wholesale pillaging of Republicans and Democrats alike – that’s right, I’m going to be bipartisan tonight – since Ronald Reagan, with a nice assist from the soft neoconservative Jimmy Carter, in the name of corporate power and plutocracy, as ever the most fundamental threats to our democracy. When they say "less government," what they mean is rule by the boardrooms, not more democracy. When they say "free markets," they mean oligarchies, they mean people so incredibly rich they don’t have to pay any attention to the laws, people so rich they buy politicians and if not politicians then the offices themselves. I know, my whole career has been as a cautious centrist, and I’ve taken tons of money from the progressives –- do you see how meaningless this word is now? -- on Wall Street, and I hired all those Clinton retreads. I didn’t know any better. Rahm and Tim and Ben, what the fuck was I thinking? Well, this is what I was thinking: I’m a professional moderate of the upper middle class, a technocrat, modestly reformist, completely anti-revolutionary, clueless about the working class. Little did I realize that after all these years of the Business Party’s two wings, Republican crazies and Democrat wimps, running the show, this actually meant I was counter-revolutionary. Who'd-a-thunk I'd become part of the problem? I’ve left populism to the animals of the right, the lunatics, Birchers, Klansmen, Know-nothings who have haunted America for ever and dragged us into the mud so often. But no more. Symbolism is fine and dandy, but it’s pretty superficial, like advertising, and it needs some guts behind it.

Tonight, I'm announcing massive cuts in the war department. Half of all your tax dollars goes to wars past present and future. Enough of that shit! This is a democracy, not an empire. I'm declaring that the national security state, a cancer in the heart of democracy for close to three-quarters of a century, is going to be cut out of the body politic. Tonight, I'm declaring that the filibuster, the tool of Southern bigots yesterday and Republican die-hards today, is moot. It will be straight up or down votes from now on in the Senate, it will be democratic, and the devil take the reactionaries.

I could go on, but I might wake up any minute....