Contradictions

Wonkette - Live-Blogging the State of the Union

Steady Leadership: President Bush's cognitive dissonance.

There's obviously plenty of analysis this morning of last night's speech, which overall was actually not bad. I still don't agree with Bush about much, but his speechwriters certainly pulled off some deft tricks, and his ploy to get all the over-55 crowd in his corner by further bankrupting the country is the kind of political chutzpah Democrats simply lack. We're going to lose this fight over Social Security. We may win a few minor concessions, but we're going to lose overall, partly because Bush is going to pander away all his potent opponents and mortage the future of people who don't vote enough or care enough to stop him.

Anyhow...

Wonkette points up the contradiction in the pander-to-the-religious-right section of the speech: "9:33: Because society is measured by how it treats weak and vulnerable, we should make gays second class citizens." I mean, really, what was the deal with this portion of the speech:

Our second great responsibility to our children and grandchildren is to honor and to pass along the values that sustain a free society.

So many of my generation, after a long journey, have come home to family and faith, and are determined to bring up responsible, moral children.

Government is not the source of these values, but government should never undermine them.

Because marriage is a sacred institution and the foundation of society, it should not be redefined by activist judges. For the good of families, children and society, I support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage.

(APPLAUSE)

Because a society is measured by how it treats the weak and vulnerable, we must strive to build a culture of life.

Don't the folks who provided the (APPLAUSE) see how this contradicts itself? That grandstanding for this hate-inspired amendment to curry favor with a group of powerful voters is a failure of the ideal promoted in the very next line of the speech?

The day may come, I hate to admit, when Bush will be looked on favorably by history if his Iraq project somehow succeeds. But he does his future reputation immeasureable harm by standing in the way of this generation's civil rights struggle rather than helping propel it forward. And he has it in his power to change this in a heartbeat. He could hold onto his no-marriage-for-those-faggots position and still be remembered as someone who advanced equality, in fact, and in doing so he could reach out to Democrats, show his willingness to break from the extreme wing of his party, and lead the way toward better days. He could do so by explaining to his base that gay unions must be recognized by the law for reasons of basic fairness, then invent a new federal designation for such relationships that would be clearly separate from marriage. He could justify it to the left by saying the relationships in question do differ from male-female ones in their tendency to produce children of both parents, though a lot of Democrats would be fine with a civil-union solution in any case. He could justify it to Republicans by telling them, truthfully, that this solution would prevent a court from opening up marriage to gays. Bush is in the perfect position to pull this off, and it would give him the sort of forward-thinking, problem-solving legacy he clearly wants. Karl Rove is a genius--why hasn't he thought of this?