"Let them eat salmon" ... the January 2011 state of the union message

The President's State of the Union address was a well crafted speech.

Politically he scored points with it, and the dumbfounded Republicans were unable to mount any kind of attack against it.

That's because the speech could just as well have been delivered by a Republican as by a Democrat.

Basically what I heard was our President:

-mocking the agencies that protect fresh water fish, salt water fish, and the food we eat, from the corporations that would poison them,

-suggesting that the answer to our problems is to magically create more teachers, scientists, and mathematicians to assist those, and other, corporations make even more money,

-giving credence to the long-ago-discredited school of trickledown economics,

-giving credence to the voodoo economics theory that cutting federal expenditures during a financial crisis would somehow be stimulative, when there isn't a single economist in the country who believes that, and

-repeating the oft-mentioned theory that America is the "best" country in the world, because of the ideals upon which our nation was founded, regardless of how far we stray from those ideals in practice.

Ronald Reagan would have been proud, and Bill Clinton no doubt was proud.

Nothing was said about how to keep a roof over the head of the budding little mathematicians, or to feed the young people who would become our future teachers, or to see that they stay out of jail and get medical attention so that they even survive to adulthood, let alone get a "college" education.

Nothing was said about how the federal government -- which last I heard was the place where the President works -- was going to help create jobs.

Nothing was said about the mortgage foreclosure crisis, or homelessness, or unchecked mental illness.

Nothing was said about the fact that it costs money to educate children, and it costs money to keep them safe and healthy.

Nothing was even said about the fact that no amount of money will be able to make up for the loss of the salmon, and the other species which we are poisoning, genetically destroying, and killing.

Was there skill and craftiness in drafting this document? Certainly.

But as for logic, there was about as much as Marie Antoinette's apocryphal response to the problem of the French people not having bread to eat.... "Let them eat cake".