The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

The reporters said before he speech that this was an important speech from Bush's standpoint and I think that's absolutely untrue. He's been re-elected, he controls the Congress, and he's sitting pretty. He can say whatever he wants. He didn't need to make a great speech. I thought the speech was objectively good.

Second, the Personal Social Security Account sounds like a pretty good idea. I know Democrats are against it, but I don't know why. From a personal standpoint, you get money that goes into an account that you know will be there when you retire. Now, if it's poorly invested, then you're screwed, but we trust ourselves to manage the rest of our money, why not this money? My job provides me a retirement account that does essentially the same thing that the Republicans are proposing. If this is how it always was, it seems like it would be a good system. My question is how one might transition to that system? Where does the money come from for people who will not be contributing to a personal account, but who still need to draw social security? And what happens if one chooses not to contribute to the personal account? Do they just get regular social security benefits?

Third, all that cheering pisses me off and the partisanship is just ludicrous. That's not a jab against any particular political party, but rather a jab on the whole fucking lame system.

The worst part was when Bush introduced the parents of some guy who died in Iraq. They cheered for those people like they had just split the atom or something. About two minutes into the cheering, I was just thinking to myself, "They're cheering like mad for these people because their son got killed. They didn't do anything, I feel badly, but why are we cheering them?" This applause is clearly some other sort of emotion that is wildly misplaced. These are the only people in the world who can actually do something about troops in Iraq either being safer or coming home and instead of doing something, they're cheering the poor people who's kids are getting killed because they want to argue about tax codes.

The Democratic response was lame. Those things are always anticlimactic. I usually don't watch them, actually.