Bush’s State of the Union speech highlights crisis of US ruling elite...

[bridgit]

'President George W. Bush’s sixth State of the Union address was delivered Wednesday in an atmosphere of crisis and demoralization gripping not only his own Republican administration, but the entire American political establishment.

The media made much of Bush having for the first time to address a Democratic-led Congress, but the prevailing mood was not so much political confrontation as general bewilderment and apprehension, with the two parties confronting a military and political debacle in Iraq in which they are both fully implicated.

A president who, as multiple polls released this week have underscored, is the most despised occupant of the White House since Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate crisis, was treated to repeated standing ovations led by the new “Madam Speaker” of the House of Representatives, Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

However, the applause, backslapping and bathos that have become the norm for this annual political ritual could not mask the fact that the US political establishment is torn by deep divisions and bitter recriminations, with some of the sharpest opposition to Bush’s policies coming not from the newly empowered Democrats, but from members of his own party.'

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jan2007/unio-j24.shtml