But do read it. It's the boilerplate rhetoric we're going to be dealing with through-out the coming Presidential campaign.
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In the last two-and-a-half years, our nation has acted decisively to confront great challenges. I came to this office to solve problems, not to pass them on to future Presidents and future generations. (Applause.) I came to seize opportunities, instead of letting them slip away. We are meeting the tests of our time. (Applause.)
Terrorists declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got. We have captured or killed many key leaders of al Qaeda, and the rest of them know we're on their trail. In Afghanistan and in Iraq, we gave ultimatums to terror regimes. Those regimes chose defiance, and those regimes are no more. (Applause.)
Fifty million people in those two countries once lived under tyranny; today, they live in freedom. (Applause
And then there are the boilerplate lies:
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Two-and-a-half years ago, our military was not receiving the resources it needed, and morale was beginning to suffer. We increased the defense budget to prepare for the threats of a new era. And today, no one in the world can question the skill, and the strength, and the spirit of the United States military. (Applause.)
Two-and-a-half years ago, we inherited an economy in recession. And then the attacks on our country, and scandals in corporate America, and war affected the people's confidence. But we acted. We passed tough new laws to hold corporate criminals to account. And to get the economy going again, we have twice led the United States Congress to pass historic tax relief for the American people. (Applause.)
We know that when Americans have more take-home pay to spend, to save, or to invest, the whole economy grows, and people are more likely to find a job. We understand whose money we spend in Washington, D.C. It is not the government's money. It is the people's money. (Applause.)
Who really thinks that the 5% of Americans who got the 60 or 70% of the tax cut refer to their income as "take-home pay?
The speech offers a pretty good list from which Democrats can work, of the faux accomplishments this President will claim, expressed in that overly generalized, often empty, often unfactual rhetoric that continues to serve him all too well. We need to figure out real fast how to deconstruct it.
Hobson expresses some hope that, given the measured-in-seconds American attention span we're told is the result of so much tv, video, and playstation viewing, at some point, surely, it will click in and people will start booing when the President trots out those threadbare cliches.
One can always hope.
**Don't look it up; it's not Shakespeare. It's a line from a classic Shakespearean sendup by that quartet of wunderkind, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore in the incomparable "Beyond The Fringe." (I was a wee lass when I heard the record, but it stayed with me)