The union is still intact but the state of the nation is dismal. Since Presidents are not required to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in their annual report to the citizens, here are some things Dr. Kidglove will not say tonight.
Our head of state violates his oath to uphold the Constitution daily. He has arrogated to himself the divine right of kings, the power of life and death over his subjects. He has repealed, by executive whim, habeas corpus, the Posse Comitatus Act, and the First, Fourth, Sixth and Eighth amendments to the Constitution.
He deploys troops, tortures, orders attacks, invades, occupies and conducts secret raids and missions that violate treaties to which the United States is signatory, the Geneva Conventions, United Nations articles and United States laws. Many of the policies and actions of the United States meet the definition of war crimes.
The President has advocated policies and signed laws that have widened the gulf between the very rich (about two per cent of Americans) and poor (about 20 per cent) and virtually destroyed the American middle class.
We have tolerated abuses of the Second Amendment to the point that the nation has become one big armed camp. Since "legal" weapons were used to slaughter 22 innocent children in Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., gunshots have killed 1,900 more Americans, including two slain yesterday near the University of Maryland campus.
We have nurtured a culture of secondary citizenship for women. Some states have claimed the right to invade women's reproductive organs by requiring vaginal ultrasound examinations before allowing certain health procedures to take place. One state, New Mexico, is considering a law that would hold a woman guilty of felonious destruction of evidence for terminating a pregnancy resulting from rape. A judge in another state ruled the victim to be at fault when she was sexually abused by a police officer.
The United States has refused to support worldwide efforts to slow the rate of climate change that is destroying ecosystems, changing habitat, warming the earth, melting polar ice and threatening the well-being of creatures great and small.
We are subsidizing the growth and profits of extraction industries whose products fill the atmosphere with destructive carbons, while refusing to encourage development of sources of sustainable energy. We export gas from fracking which destroys water sources even as the country suffers an epic continuing drought.
We have declared corporations to be "people" and given them unprecedented power over our government, while systematically repealing the constitutional rights guaranteed to individual citizens. Yet our rate of economic growth is one-fifth of that of the Third World despite record corporate profits.
We have the poorest, yet most expensive, health care in the industrialized world. The quality of our educational system is plummeting even as our politicians demand further cuts in funding it because of a mythical "national debt problem."
The most celebrated of our academic experts on economics advocate strengthening the social safety net and increasing public spending to create jobs, while our elected officials pursue austerity policies that cause troubled economies to fail even more egregiously.
We nurture an unrealistic, myth-driven national self image as a superpower operating on a high moral plane, while the rest of the world sees us as a rogue nation complicit in virtually every failed and oppressive policy in the global scheme of things. We think we are a democracy but we are a nation on the brink of becoming a fascist oligarchy and police state.
And that is the real state of the union.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
