Even though I have no intention of watching it, just knowing that President Obama will be giving his State of the Union speech tonight has left me with a queasy stomach since awakening early this morning.
I hate Obama.
That said... I also hate John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the RINOs.
My disgust is policy driven... policy driven and personality driven - "personality" in terms of knowing we're dealing with "personnel" who put themselves and their petty interests above the interests of the American People and our once great nation.
Ladies and gentlemen... I am convinced... absolutely certain... that no more than a few score in the House and perhaps a bear double-digit number of U.S. Senators put the Constitution above political expediency and partisan self-interest.
Obama though... he is actively "anti-Constitution." Yes. In the same way Woodrow Wilson was. Obama first ran for the presidency promising that if elected he would work to "fundamentally change America." Well, sir... ma'am... that's one promise he kept - and as "reward" a majority of the American electorate gave him a second term.
God help us...
In any case... here's what Williamson writes for NRO:
* * * * * *
The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous,
dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic,
dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful,
crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a
black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing
courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a
speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated
as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started
genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away
in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the
illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without
whom we could not live.
(*LEAPING TO MY FEET TO GIVE THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE*)
It’s the most nauseating display in American public life
— and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’
convention.
(*RAISED EYEBROW*)
NEVERMIND...
It’s worse than the Oscars.
WORSE THAN THE GRAMMYS!
The national self-debasement begins well before the
speech is under way. Members of Congress — supposedly free men and women
serving as the elected representatives of the citizens of a self-governing
republic — arrive hours early, camping out like spotty-faced adolescents
waiting for Justin Bieber tickets, in the hope of staking out some prime
center-aisle real estate that they might be seen on television, if only for a
second or two, being greeted by the national Pontifex Maximus as he makes his
stately procession into the chamber.
When the moment comes and the Sergeant-At-Arms utters the
sacred words — “Mr. Speaker! The president of the United States!” — the chamber
will erupt, as though the assembled have entirely forgotten that the mysterious
entity that is the object of this curious act of national worship only a decade
ago was an obscure legislator in a destitute and corrupt state, a man whose
most prominent legislative accomplishment was the passage of a bill requiring
police to videotape confessions in potential capital cases — in a state in
which there were as a practical matter no potential capital cases. (Illinois
had not carried out an execution during the century in which the law was passed
and was on its way toward abolishing capital punishment categorically.)
But they will listen, rapt, and the media mandarins
afterward will evaluate each promise with great sobriety, ignoring entirely
that the central promise made during the same charlatan’s first State of the
Union address was subsequently labeled “Lie of the Year” by the great man’s own
frustrated admirers.
That an entire class of people should be so enthusiastic
about being lied to, serially, is perplexing.
SICKENING...
And then there are the human props.
This year’s victim du jour is one Jason Collins, an aging
professional basketball player boasting more than $32 million in lifetime
earnings who has publicly affirmed his homosexuality. For this act of
courage/oversharing, he is to be seated in the first lady’s box. That there is
such a thing as the first lady’s box is lamentable in and of itself. There is a
royal box at London’s Royal Opera, complete with a private, Victorian-style
toilet. And while the antiquated royal toilet may be a perfect metaphor for the
State of the Union festivities, this is a republic, not a monarchy, and honors
and offices are not accrued through marriage. Michelle Obama is a currently
unemployed former part-time hospital administrator and mother to two lovely
daughters. That is admirable enough, but she is a figure of public importance
through marriage only, which is to say, properly a figure of curiosity, not of
policy. She is not a royal consort, and proximity to her in seating should not
constitute a message about the direction of government. (Even Lady Macbeth was
known to dispense with such pretensions when pressed: “Stand not upon the order
of your going,” she advises her dinner guests.)
There will be other totems, of course: victims of the
Boston Marathon bombing, the District of Columbia’s teacher of the year (cf.
“tallest building in Wichita”), and a kid who built an “extreme marshmallow
cannon” for a White House science fair — an act of engineering that almost
certainly would have gotten him kicked out of any D.C. teacher of the year’s
classroom, if not imprisoned.
The State of the Union has not always been a grotesque
spectacle.
George Washington delivered his briefing in person, but
he was dealing with a self-respecting Congress that understood itself to be his
equal in government.
When President Washington wanted the Senate’s advice and
consent for an Indian treaty, he visited the chamber personally to seek it —
and was so put off by the questioning and debate to which he was subjected that
he vowed never to put himself through that again.
Thomas Jefferson, ever watchful against monarchical
pretensions in the federal apparatus, discontinued the practice of delivering
the State of the Union in person before Congress, instead submitting a written
report. For a blessed century, Jefferson’s example was followed, and, despite
civil war and the occasional financial panic, the nation thrived without an
ersatz Caesar to rule over it.
It will come as no surprise that the imperial model was
reinstated by Woodrow Wilson, Princeton’s answer to Benito Mussolini and the
most dangerous man ever elected to the American presidency, a would-be dictator
who attempted to criminalize the act of criticizing the state, dismissed the
very idea of individual rights as “a lot of nonsense,” and described his vision
of the presidency as effectively unlimited (“The President is at liberty, both
in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can”). A big man needs a big
show, and it is to Wilson’s totalitarian tastes that we owe the modern pageant.
(*NOD*)
The next Republican president should remember why his
party is called the Republican party and put a stop to this.
The State of the Union is only one example of the
deepening, terrifying cult of the state that has taken root here. Many heads of
state — and some royals, for that matter — fly on commercial aircraft.
Presidents of the Swiss federation and members of the federal council receive .
. . an unlimited train pass.
An American president stages a Roman triumph every time
he heads out for a round of golf. The president’s household costs well more
than $1 billion annually to operate. The president’s visage is more ubiquitous
than was Vladimir Lenin’s in his prime, his reach Alexandrian, his sense of
immortality (they call it “legacy”) pharaonic. Washington has become a deeply
weird and alien place, a Renaissance court with armored sedans and
hundred-million-dollar paydays.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
It’s expensive maintaining an imperial class, but money
isn’t really the object here, and neither is the current occupant of the White
House, unlikeable as he is. Whether it’s Barack Obama or some subsequent
pathological megalomaniac, Republican or Democrat, the increasingly ceremonial
and quasi-religious aspect of the presidency is unseemly. It is profane. It is
unbecoming of us as a people, and it has transformed the presidency into an
office that can be truly attractive only to men who are unfit to hold it.
George Washington showed the world that men do
not need a king. We, his heirs, have allowed the coronation of something much
worse.
