Hendrik Hertzberg's is the best analysis of Bush's State of the Union that I've read. After covering familiar territory — the omission of any mention of the Mars project after it played poorly in opinion polls, those absurd steroid comments, and the delicious irony of Bush's promise that "no one can now doubt the word of America" — Hertzberg concludes with a brilliant riff on one of the President's more ridiculous rhetorical maneuvers:
In last year’s State of the Union, Bush’s buzz phrase was “weapons of mass destruction,” the threat of which justified the impending conquest of Iraq. This year’s speech subsumed that phrase into the longer, mealier “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities,” a usefully adaptable locution. Were teams of inspectors to fan out across Bush’s domestic policies in search of solutions to the nation’s problems, they would be less likely to return empty-handed if they settle for environment-related program activities (such as logging in national forests), education-related program activities (such as requiring tests without providing the funds to help kids pass them), and health care-related program activities (such as forbidding Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices). Like the speech itself, all this comes under the heading of winning the election-related program activities. Here’s hoping it will prove equally effective.
“Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.” And the people who so loathed Clinton for his "is" like this guy for what reason?
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