A Response to the State of the Union Address
On 20 January 2004, President Bush lied. But then again that isn’t new. What
I find incredible is that he lied to the entire nation, the members of
Congress, and foreign heads of state at the same time. That is a feat that
only the President of the United States is capable of doing with a straight
face. And in George W. Bush’s grand tradition of curious language, he called
this lie the State of the Union Address.
In Bush’s State of the Union, which was a thinly veiled piece of election
year politicking, he attempted to fan the flames of American fear by
invoking again and again the images of September 11th, dead police officers,
threatened servicemen and servicewomen, bombings at home and abroad, weapons
of mass destruction in the hands of rogue nations, and an ever looming
threat just out of eyesight ready to swoop down on unsuspecting women and
children. Bush again attempted to paint the war in Iraq as a war of
liberation and again insisted that Saddam Hussein was attempting to build,
had built, and would have built weapons of mass destruction if the United
States hadn’t taken action. This statement of course ignored the fact that
no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq and no weapons
manufacturing sites or substances have been identified after almost a year
of occupation and more than a year of inspections and searches.
But Bush didn’t stop with lying; he compounded his already outrageous
audacity by calling the Middle East a place of tyranny. While the Middle
East is a region with nations that continue to suffer under autocratic
rulers that commit heinous crimes against humanity, George W. Bush is no man
to decry tyranny. His government has done more to roll back civil liberties
and human rights than at any other at any time in modern U.S. history.
George W. Bush has gutted constitutional protections through the use of the
Patriot Act and his war powers as President. He has declared that the U.S.
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have no constitutionally protected rights, as
they are not being held on U.S. soil. Hundreds of law abiding U.S. citizens
have found themselves unable to fly or leave the country because of
unconstitutional “no-fly” lists. And, secret U.S. military tribunals with no
constitutional oversight continue work covertly throughout the nation and
the world. There is tyranny in the world, and there is a tyrant at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue.
The President continued his creative storytelling by evoking a domestic
picture of the United States not even loosely based on reality. Mr. Bush
claimed in his address that the economy is in an upswing, even though
millions of Americans continue to be unemployed, many of which lost their
jobs during Bush’s reign in the White House. The several states of this
union continue to face tremendous budget deficits. He outlined his new
temporary workers program, which I lovingly call Operation Bootstrap II,
which is at the very least problematic and has faced strenuous criticism
from organized labor and worker’s rights organizations. And, the President
touted the fact that there has been a 36% increase in funding for education
since 2001, yet school districts nation-wide continue to struggle (for
example the two-year deficit of the Minneapolis Public Schools for 2003 and
2004 will reach nearly $50 million dollars). Bush needs a reality check; his
economic plan has failed. Our lives and our livelihoods have worsened under
his leadership. The reality he projects is real only in his mind, and the
millions of unemployed and working poor across this country will provide him
with an abrupt introduction to their reality in November 2004, when they lay
him off from his job as President of the United States.
Near the end of the address came the piez de resistance: Bush’s call for the
protection of marriage. His attempt to further marginalize gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, and queer communities only further demonstrates his
bigotry and the chokehold the immoral and ignorant religious right has on
his presidency. Bush, will be remembered as the the butcher of civil
liberties and the hatemonger that stole a nation. He calls the court system
fulfilling its constitutionally mandated role to interpret the law as
judicial activism forgetting that it was judicial activism that declared him
President of the United States. What Bush fails to realize is that the
Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has fulfilled its civic and legal
responsibility, as well as a moral obligation to uphold the sovereign and
unalienable rights of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer
individuals living in Massachusetts. The president is running scared because
he recognizes that the moral bankrupt, prejudice filled, and hateful
rhetoric of the right no longer has a death grip on American lives, values,
and politics. It is only a matter of time before the constitutional promise
of liberty and justice for all made more than 200 years ago becomes fact not
fiction for all people living in these United States of America.
-W. Brandon Lacy Campos
-Chair, National Lavender Green Caucus*
-Green Party of the United States
W. Brandon Lacy
Development Associate
YouthLink
41 North 12th Street
Minneapolis, MN 55403
612.252.1208
lacy@youthlinkmn.org
“The tactics we choose are less important than the tenacity we
demonstrate.” –Ricardo Levins Morales
