It's a puzzle

President Obama's second inaugural address was pretty much a potboiler, long on rhetoric and very short indeed on specifics. He carried his first inaugural address on the sheer force of his oratory, but that is wearing thin now, at least with me. But then, inaugural addresses are ephemeral things generally.

Now the State of the Union address is usually expected to be something better - the president is expected, certainly just after his inauguration, to lay out his plans for his next term. That is what puzzles me. What he laid out was a liberal wish list that he has to know has little chance of passing the Republican House or even the Democratic Senate. He may get a few things, like modest immigration reform and some sort of token gun restrictions, but the rest of his wish list is pure fantasy, completely unaffordable in a nation already borrowing almost half of each year's federal budget. And what was conspicuously absent - again - was any plan at all to address the federal deficit or the ballooning federal debt.

 Readers of this blog will already know that I am deeply disappointed in the President - a constitutional lawyer who has repeatedly ignored constitutional limits (think recess appointments, or more recently the assertion that he has the right to kill any American he deems a threat, or anyone else, anywhere in the world with drones, on his own orders, without any oversight or judicial proceedings). But more fundamentally, I am appalled that he still hardly ever acknowledges the huge deficit, and certainly hasn't done anything to help it and much to make it worse. What can he be thinking??