Deconstructing The SOTU

Going over the transcript of the 2015 Presidential State of The Union address.

"Six years ago, nearly 180,000 American troops served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, fewer than 15,000 remain." Iraq was a strategic prize and was largely pacified. By withdrawing every last soldier, he created a vacuum that allowed ISIS to emerge, and prevented a regional check on Iran.

"In two weeks, I will send this Congress a budget filled with ideas that are practical, not partisan." I predict a re-run of the contested votes on some of his previous budgets. When he has actually submitted a budget on time, they have failed 99-0, 97-0, 414-0 and 413-2.

"Rebekah and Ben Erler of Minneapolis were newlyweds." Rebekah wrote the President a letter. "America, Rebekah and Ben's story is our story. They represent the millions who have worked hard, and scrimped, and sacrificed, and retooled." Actually, they represent the Democratic Party. Rebekah is a Democratic operative and former staffer to Senator Patty Murray.

"Our younger students have earned the highest math and reading scores on record." Fourth graders. What about our high schoolers? How are they doing?

"Today, we have a ... new consumer watchdog to protect us from predatory lending." Predatory lending. All those people who signed zero-down mortgage documents on homes they couldn't afford based on their income, were preyed upon. Right.

"Middle class economics works." Is that how this will be packaged going forward? Most jobs created during this recovery have been part-time jobs, because a business has to offer a health insurance policy to new hires working more than thirty hours a week. That is codified in the ACA. To say nothing of the fact that median incomes are down more than $2,000 under Obama.

"My plan will make quality childcare more available, and more affordable." Because what we need is to get our women out of the house and into those low-paying part-time jobs. To free them.

"Forty-three million workers have no paid sick leave." Perhaps if the government would stop imposing health insurance requirements on small business, these companies would decide on their own to offer paid leave.

"This Congress still needs to pass a law that makes sure a woman is paid the same as a man for doing the same work." They did, in 1963. It's called the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

"...to everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage...if you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it" Most of the workers being paid minimum wage are youths in high income families. People raising families on low-wage, unskilled jobs are supported by dozens of redistribution plans, like EITC and WIC.

"21st century businesses, including small businesses, need to sell more American products overseas." Unless these products are petroleum or petroleum distillates that flow through the Keystone pipeline.

"Let's close the loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top one percent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth." Is the President advocating a wealth tax? Does he understand the difference between income and wealth?

"We're also supporting a moderate opposition in Syria that can help us in this effort, and assisting people everywhere who stand up to the bankrupt ideology of violent extremism." Why is he reluctant to call it Islamic supremacy? Is he still tying to get them to like us?

"In Cuba, we are ending a policy that was long past its expiration date. When what you're doing doesn't work for fifty years, it's time to try something new." Tell that to Raul Castro. When oil prices collapsed, their current patrons Venezuela and Iran reduced the cash keeping his dictatorship afloat. Within a very short time the regime would have collapsed. Instead, Obama negotiated with himself because the poll numbers supported it.

"Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran, where, for the first time in a decade, we've halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material." Reduced its stockpile? Is he certain of this? Surely Obama is aware of taqiyya, or religious dissimulation?

"But new sanctions passed by this Congress, at this moment in time, will all but guarantee that diplomacy fails." He keeps using that word. I'm not sure it means what he thinks it means. Diplomacy means using every tool in the toolbox short of military force. Sanctions are a tool of diplomacy.

"2014 was the planet's warmest year on record." Er, no. There has been a pause lasting 18 years now. RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming since October 1996. The NOAA data that the President is relying on is based on ground-based measuring stations only measure the air temperature where they are based, and estimate the temperature from as far as 500 miles away.

"A better politics is one where we appeal to each other's basic decency instead of our basest fears." With the exception of hitting the panic button about climate change, rape on campus, unequal pay, and racial, class and income disparities!