I wonder if the annual speech would be any better–more inspirational, or whatever–if it was titled The State of America. Do you grasp the distinction?
Anyway, I don’t know if I can bear to listen to it. Of course, my only reason for doing so would be to yell at the TV a few times. I don’t know if I can even count on 5 or 10 minutes of decent inspirational stuff (in so many words: kill many terrorists). Of course, the rest of the speech will be the standard drivel about how you are now going to be able to live at even more of the expense of your neighbors, and everyone else.
You are also likely to hear reference to this particular bit of presidential lunacy, as described by Jeff Jacoby:
Some of that delusion was on display at the White House on Thursday,
when President George Bush painted the Palestinian election as a
"healthy" and "interesting" exercise in civic reform:"Obviously, people were not happy with the status quo," Bush explained.
"The people are demanding honest government. The people want services.
They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which
they can get a decent education and they can find healthcare. And so
the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the
Palestinian territories…. There’s something healthy about a system
that does that. And so the elections yesterday were very interesting."Please, Mr. President. If a slate of neo-Nazi skinheads swept to power
in a European election, would you say that the voters were seeking
"honest government" and "services"? Palestinians are not stupid, and it
insults their intelligence to pretend that when they vote to empower a genocidal organization with a platform straight out of Mein Kampf, what they’re really after is better healthcare. Islamist extremism isn’t needed to fix Palestinian hospitals any more than Fascism was needed to make Italian trains run on time
in the 1920s. If Palestinians turned out en masse to elect a party that
unapologetically stands for hatred and mass murder, it’s a safe bet
that the hatred and mass murder had something to do with the turnout.By the same token, Hamas’s new duties are not going to turn it into a
moderate group of diligent civil servants. When violent Islamists win
political power, their brutality and zealotry do not diminish. (See
"Khomeini, Ayatollah" and "Taliban, Afghan"). The notion that Hamas now
has "a choice to make" is just another example of the delusional
thinking that is so pervasive when it comes to the Palestinian
Authority.