George Bush’s State of the Union speech could have been a lot worse, and he has definitely given worse speeches. I didn’t think he humiliated himself or our country too bad. I thought he did a great job of saying absolutely nothing. His speech gave no important information that wasn’t already known by everyone. He managed to talk for 50 minutes without saying anything of any importance, or anything that needed to be said.

This is exactly what America wants to hear. We don’t want to hear anything. We don’t want to hear about any of the problems our country is having or how we plan to fix them, we just want to be assured that everything is OK without getting any actual information.

President Bush started his speech off right away by paying some tribute to Coretta Scott King. I thought that was a good move on his part. It definitely made him look like a good, sensitive person. Bush is an expert at these sorts of tactics used in speech giving. He always seems to have some way of making himself look like a good Christian, which really seems to win a lot of people over.

Bush, of course, brought up the tragedies of September 11, which is always a good way to manipulate people’s emotions, and make them fearful. This is a great technique. It’s been working for five solid years. I can’t think of many speeches where Bush failed to mention September 11, even when it is completely irrelevant to what he’s talking about.

Bush talks about fighting “the enemy” in the Iraq war, but no one can really seem to define who “the enemy” is. Somehow by fighting “the enemy” we are defeating terrorism. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t see the connection.

Bush also went into how we’re going to work on a better health-care plan, make public schools better, fix New Orleans and get rid of AIDS. He didn’t offer us much about how we are going to do any of these things. These are all nice ideas, but I’ll bet that a year from now not much of this will improve, because we don’t have a plan to execute.

“By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.” This was a great quote. He makes it sound so easy to do this. There is no way that we are going to stop using the Middle East as our source for energy. If that’s in our plans, then why are we still at war? And most important, how are we going to do any of that?

George Bush made himself sound pretty good, and told most Americans exactly what they wanted to hear. This is a great talent of our president. He knows exactly how to manipulate people and make it look like he’s running this country well, without having to take much action at all.