"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." ― George Orwell, Animal Farm
© SOTT.net
What was striking about this year's State of the Union address was not the sheer arrogance of the president's remarks, the staged nature of the proceedings and interactions, or the predictable posturing of the rebuttals, but the extent to which the members of the various branches of government - President Obama, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the assorted government agencies - are just one big, brawling, noisy, semi-incestuous clan.
Watching these bureaucrats, both elected and appointed, interact in the unguarded moments before the event, with their hugging and kissing and nudging and joking and hobnobbing and general high spirits, I was reminded anew that these people -
Republicans and Democrats alike - are united in a common goal, and it is not to protect and defend the Constitution.
No, as Orwell recognized in
Animal Farm, their common goal is to maintain the status quo, a goal that is helped along by an unquestioning, easily mollified, corporate media. In this way, the carefully crafted spectacle that is the State of the Union address is just that: an exaggerated farce of political theater intended to dazzle, distract and divide us, all the while the police state marches steadily forward.
No matter what the president and his cohorts say or how convincingly they say it, the reality Americans must contend with is that the world is no better the day after President Obama's State of the Union address than it was the day before. Indeed, if the following rundown on the actual state of our freedoms is anything to go by, the world is a far more dangerous place.
Comment: See also:
GCHQ and European spy agencies worked together on mass surveillance
NSA/GCHQ - The New Praetorians and the New Cold War
Somebody's listening: How the NSA, GCHQ, Germany and China have spent decades working together to spy on the whole world