i, like you, am a person, with arms and legs, and we all sometimes stop for lunch, and as ordinary folks, we hate to get lint on our jackets, and...
Nation lapses into instant coma:I'm Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of the State of Kansas.Two hundred and forty-five words of pure filler, with ellipses intact from the hideous original. And this in response to the biggest, fattest hanging softball -- George Bush calls on Congress to balance the budget and bring the 9/11 attackers to justice! -- in years. It hurts to watch.
And I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you tonight.
I'm a Democrat, but tonight, it really doesn't matter whether you think of yourself as a Democrat...or a Republican...or an Independent. Or...none-of-the-above.
Instead, the fact you're tuning in this evening tells me each of you is, above all...
...an American, first.
You are mothers, and fathers. Grandparents, and grandchildren. Working people, and business-owners. Americans, all.
And the American people - folks like you, and me - are not nearly as divided as our rancorous politics might suggest.
In fact, right now, tonight, as political pundits discuss the President's speech - chances are, they'll obsess over the reactions of Members of Congress.
"How many times was the President interrupted by applause? Did Republicans stand? Did Democrats sit?"
And the rest of us will roll our eyes and think, "What in the world does any of that have to do with me?"
And, so, I want to take a slight detour from tradition on this State of the Union night.
In this time, normally reserved for the partisan response, I hope to offer you something more:
An American Response.
A national call to action on behalf of the struggling families in the heartland, and across this great country. A wakeup call to Washington, on behalf of a new American majority, that time is running out on our opportunities to meet our challenges and solve our problems.
posted by Chris Bray @ 7:31 PM
4 Comments:
I haven't seen Bush's speech yet, but if past history is any indication, that's pretty much the end of Sebelius' political career.
The speech is a horrifying parody of a typical SotU: trotting out disaster victims for heartwarming stories, simplistic personalization, establishing personal bona fides, honor the troops, bipartisanship, flat-affected calls to action, claiming victories that aren't and calling for policies that won't solve anything or else won't pass out of committee.
It's like a SotU Mad Lib....
"Working together, working hard, committing to results, we can get the job done."
You'll probably enjoy this: Bill uses MS Word's autosummarize to condense the speech, in this case to 1/100th of its original length. It's a decided improvement over the full experience.
It's true -- the thing actually loses no substance. Although I do miss the part where she tells us that we're all people.
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