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Kathy's US Politics Blog

By Kathy Gill, About.com Guide to US Politics since 2004

SOTU Commentary

Tuesday January 29, 2008
President Bush delivered his last State of the Union address Monday night. Here's a flash back to 2002, courtesy of Devericks at the Seattle Times:
As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers.

It's almost like he had a crystal ball, isn't it? Except he missed the fact that six years later the US would be fighting not one war but two ... and that economic conditions, at least as measured by the federal debt, would deteriorate at an alarming pace (although the subject is pretty much ignored by most mainstream media and candidates for President).

More from Larry West, Tom Head and Robert Longley. Also, see A History of the State of the Union

From the web: Parsing Bush's State of the Union words over 7 years (LAT blog), State of the Union (NYT; their op-ed writers did the same thing Devericks did ... look at old speeches), Bush Legacy Is Iraq Fiasco (National Post blogs, Canada), You Can't Stop The Bush (Guardian blogs) and the featured YouTube clip.

Comments

February 2, 2008 at 2:22 pm
(1) dpb says:

Two wars? There is one war on terror. To say otherwise would be to then split WWII into at least three wars, one each versus Germany, Italy and Japan.

February 3, 2008 at 3:04 am
(2) uspolitics says:

The “war on terror” is a rhetorical device. There is no nation state called “terror.”

Even Bush didn’t link Iran and Afghanistan when he started the second war.

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