SOTU 2015: Dog-andPony Show Needs to be Cancelled Forever

Can one tell the difference between campaign speeches and political fund raisers with any State of the Union address?

Todd S. Purdom wrote at Politico:

Blame Woodrow Wilson, who broke a century-old presidential tradition of delivering the State of the Union message only in writing. Blame Harry S. Truman, the first chief executive to make the address on television, or Lyndon B. Johnson, the first to do so in prime time. ...

“The Constitution’s mild requirement has become a tiresome exercise in political exhibitionism,” the columnist George Will wrote this week, calling the speech “the most execrable ceremony in the nation’s civic liturgy, regardless of which party’s president is abusing it” as a “made-for-television political pep rally.”

It has become a practice to have an “honored guest” or two sitting with the First Lady – something like a circus side show displaying citizens who have been chosen to represent the politics of the president. Obama had almost more than just a few and one of them was an illegal immigrant that Democrats like to call “undocumented”. Ana Zamora is a recipient of President Obama's DREAM policy that bypassed both immigration laws and Congress, like too many of this president's executive orders that Obama calls “memos” have done.

It was Ronald Reagan who invited the first citizen hero to be saluted in the House gallery by a president during a State of the Union speech as an “honored guest”.

It is time for presidents to take the cue of Thomas Jefferson and submit in writing to Congress the State of the Union because it has become nothing but a dog-and-pony show and “partisan spectacle”. Our nation did fine without the spectacle for 112 years. The longest State of the Union addresses delivered in 1995 and 2000 goes to William Clinton, lasting almost an hour and a half. Most speeches last a little more than thirty minutes.

The blog, Ghosts of Judd Hall had it right in 2013:

Please Mr. President Submit It in Writing. Thomas Jefferson was onto something. Email the written address  to every Congressional member, make it a downloadable PDF file at www.whitehouse.gov, publish it in every newspaper that spans Our Nation and hand out copies to anyone that wants to read it. Publish the visiting team's written response too. Save us from another night of feigned bipartisanship, political bickering and inaction. Spare us from the television coverage. Maybe The President and the Congressional leaders could spend that Monday night doing something constructive instead of talking.

Hypocrisy was prevalent when Obama received a standing ovation when he entered to make his political speech. Congress should have remained ominously silent after the past several weeks of Obama's deliberate flouting of Congress's authority.

As usual, Obama's foreign policy claims were mythical. Overall it was fantastic tale. To Obama, the greatest threat is climate change. The League of Junk Scientists and Alarmist Politicians marches on.

Obama's tax plan is incredible, making the death tax even more cruel and raising taxes instead of budgeting – a problem on both sides of the political aisle. In reality, the Obama death tax proposal is a creation of a “second death tax”.

Let's cut out the PR tactics and start a true reformation back to the Founder's constitional republic.