Trusting the people

I did not watch President Bush’s State of the Union speech last night. I usually don’t have time to sit down and watch the TV during primetime anyway since that is when we are in the midst of herding our children up the stairs, bathing them and reading books to them before putting them to bed - a process that generally starts around 7:30 and ends around 8:30 p.m. if we are lucky.
But I didn’t bother to record the speech either, which is unusual. I’m so thoroughly disgusted with and disappointed in this president that I don’t think I could have stomached his final, pointless SOTU address.
About the only thing I was curious about was whether or not Bush could keep a straight face when saying “The state of our union is strong”, which I think is required by law for every president to say at some point in the speech. Did anyone in the audience snicker at that moment?
But now I see today that Bush did not speak those words at the beginning of the address as is tradtionally done. Instead, he saved them for the very end and added a rhetorical twist like this:

"So long as we continue to trust the people, our nation will prosper, our liberty will be secure and the state of our union will remain strong."

And there in a nutshell is the entire problem with the past seven years which have been nothing short of disasterous for our nation. Back in 2000, we did not “trust the people.” For if we had, Al Gore, the winner of the popular vote, would have been named president. Instead, we trusted a screwed up electoral college system that should have been junked long ago, and a sharply divided, partisan Supreme Court which foistered the popular vote loser down our throats.
And so, for the past seven years we have had the Worst President Ever, who, in league with one of the Worst Congresses Ever, has managed to shrink our nation’s superpower status by leading us into a quagmire in the Middle East that has weakened our military infrastructure and reduced our standing in the world, while at the same time pursuing a fiscally irresponsible domestic agenda at home that has left us with record deficits and an economy on the brink of recession.
Hopefully, by this time next year, assuming that we “trust the people,” the person giving the next SOTU address will either be Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama, and the person sitting behind the president next to Nancy Pelosi WILL NOT be Dick Cheney.
That, by itself, is something to look forward to.