I gotta say - I didn't really watch. I sort of knew what the President would be saying, and I sort of knew what the responses would be.

I heard a little of the Republican response. I have to say that I find it a bit odd that there needs to be this party line partisanship - if the duly elected President of our country gets to say something, some hack from the opposite party gets to go on tv and try to spin things back their way. And I felt this way about other Presidents also - I didn't see a reason for the Democrats to get the last word in when Bush was president, either - not on something like this.

But from what I heard of the Republican response, it was a speech that hit their "talking points" and hoped for the best. You know - big government bad, little government good. Big deficit bad, rein in spending good. That stuff.

Where was these guys when we had no deficit spending, at the end of the Clinton years? Eight years of Republican administration, six of them with the full Congress behind it, and what we mostly saw was an increasing federal deficit and an economy going into the toilet, not to mention getting us involved in two wars. (I don't like wars period, but it was obvious from the get-go that Iraq was going to be another Vietnam in terms of not being able to control the country.) No one complained when they were spending money like drunken sailors, in the process making a lot of people rich. Why? Because it was "war". Because taxes were being "cut".

But let's not dwell on the past (to paraphrase Mark McGwire). This administration came into a very difficult situation. Two costly wars to run, a financial meltdown about to occur, people losing their homes and jobs, and a trickle down effect that seemed to put our domestic automakers at risk of failure. "Too big to fail" became the phrase of the day. How they got that way is a valid question, but that's not really in the scope of this entry. They were already "too big to fail" and threatened to take down the financial structure of the country with them. So the government did what it had to do - it gave (or loaned) them the money they needed to stay afloat. That was the previous administration's call. They gave Bank of America, AIG, and all the other "too big to fail" companies that money, with no real strings attached, apparently.

Now this administration comes along and sees that the ripples of this housing meltdown are already threatening the common citizen. Unemployment is rising. Which of course leads to more problems with mortgages.

Seems to me there were only two ways to go with this one. One was to say screw the middle class, let them go under. Let them lose their houses and their jobs and let their collapse lead to the collapse of more businesses and more jobs lost. Then try to rise out of the wreckage, like a phoenix coming out of the flames. Sounds scary. Sounds like 1932 or something.

The other way was to throw a massive amount of money at the problem. The thinking was, yes we're spending money but we're putting it into the pockets of Americans and at least we're getting something tangible out of it. (Unlike, oh, say, getting "democracy" and "freedom" for a nation of people who don't value it as we do.) We'd get roads and bridges and schools and educated kids and sewers and new locks, dams, levees, whatever else. We'd get construction workers who pocketed the wages, took them home, used them to buy food, pay their bills, maybe use it to pay their mortgages and keep their homes. Maybe some of them buy a new home, thus setting that set of dominos toppling, with perhaps more homes sold as sellers finally move properties.

That sounds better to me. Worth a try. But to Republicans, this sounds terrible! Why? Honestly, I'd like someone to explain it to me.

Unfortunately, all we get is a bunch of sound bites out of the critics of this administration, with no real plans of their own, and a goal of diminishing the President's approval ratings and taking back power for themselves. Lost in all this are we, the people of this country. We should be angry. But I believe we're misdirecting our anger at those who are trying to help us, and making heroes of those who are trying to keep widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.