Opinion
 

Staff Editorial

Matthew Dulin        Ray Hafner       Geronimo Rodriguez
         Shaun Salnave          Cara Sarelli

Fate of the Union

Buried beneath empty promises and unsubstantiated pro-war rhetoric lay the true substance of President Bushis State of the Union address, which he made Tuesday night: The fate of the union is war.

In the first 40 minutes of his speech, the president tugged the reins of Congress and spat a couple times out the side of his mouth while offering preaching-to-the-choir hopes of improving the environment, fixing the entire U.S. economy, providing Americans with affordable health care and getting hydrogen-powered cars on the market by the time todayis babies enroll in driveris education.

Right on. Right on.

He patted himself on the back for his tax-cut plan while plugging his next agenda — one for a plan to pass 2004 and 2006 tax cuts early, to put the money back into the hands of American citizens.

And even with this tax cut, Bush is somehow going to allocate $600 million to rehabilitate 300,000 drug addicts, $15 billion over five years to help those infected with AIDS in Africa to get medication and $6 billion for Project Bioshield, to protect Americans from bioterrorism. 

What a guy.

Question: How many UH students benefited from his previous tax-cut plan? How much did it actually help the economy? In a school with so many students working to feed their families and pay their fee bills, the answer can be safely assumed to be a pretty small number.

As the speech ran live on television, one viewer pointed out that Bushis speech made a lot more sense if you insert the word "rich" before Americans. And you know what? It does.

But aside from the fact that Bush spent a little too much time schmoozing over stuff he has absolutely no real plan for, he did spend about 15 minutes on the number-one issue, something that will affect all Americans — war.

"We will answer every danger … that threatens the American people," he said.

Bush went on toward the end of his speech to outline the threat he says Iraq is posing, basing all his claims on what U.S. intelligence has told him.

Secretary of State Colin Powell will relay this information to the United Nations on Feb. 5, and the United States will not be shocked at whatis to come.

"Sometimes peace must be defended … we will fight in a just cause and by just means," Bush said.

Sounds like weire about to fight a "war to end all wars." Oh, wait, we already did that — twice.
Send comments to dccampus@mail.uh.edu