The Online Reflector

By Andrew Gouty
Online Editor

Last week many of us saw President George W. Bush give his last State of the Union address. Many more Americans had similar thoughts approximately four years ago. Save the paranoid fear of a coup d’état, that expectation will actually be met this year.

So what’s next? That’s the question a majority of pundits and politicians have been rattling about for too many months before an eventual election this fall.

For seven years now, President Bush has attempted to address that question for us all. Depending on his answers, we have nodded or shook our heads in disgust.

In the past, a good portion of the State of the Union gave the president a figurative opportunity to show his report card to his parents. Rarely, though, when I was in high school could I have chosen which grades to show to my parents or fudged a few test scores along the way. George W. Bush has turned doing that into an art.

I’ve heard it said that many politicians (President Bush forefront) are polishing their images for the history books, perhaps believing that future generations will recognize their great efforts as something more than the current American populace sees now.

Donald Rumsfeld has become somewhat infamous for his belittling of the American people about the Iraq war. Rumsfeld was right.
I don’t know how many enemies we’ve created in the past 50 or more years, shoving our noses in foreign policies that shouldn’t concern us.

We simply don’t understand the severity of the threats facing the American people. But the Department of Homeland Security has got your back—be sure of that (just ask Ray Nagin).

Every time you pick up the phone to call your friends overseas, try not to think about your rights as an American citizen and you’ll be just fine.

And remember that tax rebate check you’ll be getting in a few months? Try not to put it right back into your credit card debt and student loans.

It’s not necessarily these problems that bother me about our federal government. We can’t live in a perfect world.
My issue comes at how extremely impressed our political leaders are at their half-baked solutions to bigger problems.

The Democratic response to the president’s address is a great example.

Kathleen Sebelius had enough cannon fodder to go on for hours about the mismanagement of the Bush administration. Instead, she took the subtle approach, making a lukewarm appeal for bipartisan action in Washington. It was at the mention of the word “bipartisan” that I hope a majority of viewers threw up their hands and turned off their televisions.
If I could sum up the entire situation in a word, it would be “mundane.” President Bush is still a child, consistently wrong and consistently trying to cover up his mistakes.

The new majority of Democrats in Congress continues to promise and continues to fail to deliver on almost everything except economic reforms that have come too late and aren’t guaranteed to fix anything.

And here we are—still the American people—still waiting for something.
I wish someone could tell me what that is.