It's a rare thing when I agree with George Will, but his visceral dread of State of the Union addresses — those spectacles in which the commonplace as well as the cretinous receive thunderous applause from party bulls and halfwitted backbenchers — is, alas, most agreeable to my mind. "The Constitution laconically requires only that the president 'shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient,'" Will reminded us in 2013, reasoning that "nothing requires 'from time to time' to be construed as 'every damn year.'"
And yet, every year we suffer. I dreaded these sufferings under Bush and I dreaded them under Obama and I sure as hell would dread one (it may be the only one) under … I can't say it right now. Even the thought that this orange fright-wigged clown will be remarking on the state of our union that he is so vigorously assaulting is more than I can bear. Adds Will:
"It is beyond unseemly, it is anti-constitutional for senior military officers and, even worse, Supreme Court justices to attend these political rallies where, with metronomic regularity, legislators of the president’s party leap to their feet to whinny approval of every bromide and vow. Members of the other party remain theatrically stolid, thereby provoking brow-furrowing punditry about why John Boehner did not rise (to genuflect? salute? swoon?) when Barack Obama mentioned this or that."
And just what is it, tonight, that members of the president's party will whinny approval of and Nancy Pelosi will stoically sit through, thereby provoking brow-furrowing pundits to ask why? Infrastructure, mainly. Or, in the Age of Trump (there, I said it), a privatization racket for the benefit of his billionaire pals. Or, as the nonprofit watchdog Democracy Forward puts it, "a blueprint for cronyism."
Krugman suggests rather sensibly that the government should rebuild America the "straightforward way: if you think we should build more infrastructure, then build more infrastructure, and never mind the complicated private equity/tax credits stuff [which repays investors '82 percent of the equity they put in']." This now-unfashionable concept, however, presents a problem to those more interested in distributing the loot to private concerns — themselves. "You could try to come up with some justification for the complexity of the [private equity/tax credit] scheme," continues Krugman, "but one simple answer would be that it’s not about investment, it’s about ripping off taxpayers. Is that implausible, given who we’re talking about?" (See? Krugman couldn't write his name either.)
Of course it is not implausible. Any crooked scheme under this Republican Congress and this administration is, rather, to be expected. And I shan't suffer it tonight.
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Note: The photo is of Woodrow Wilson's 1913 revival of in-person SOTUs.