“Our Constitution begins with those three simple words, words we’ve come to recognize mean all the people, not just some; words that insist we rise and fall together”. “It will only happen if we fix our politics”.
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LIASSON: Instead, we should call them what they are, he said – killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out and destroyed.
“When politicians insult Muslims… that doesn’t make us safer”, he said, in a thinly veiled reference to Trump’s radical proposal to bar Muslims from the US.
“It was odd some in the chamber didn’t appreciate that”, Obama said. He reminded us that our vision of a fair and just society can only be realized when we participate as citizens.
In the early copy of the remarks released ahead of delivery, the President was only slated to say the last line once, rather than four times.
“All the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air. As he enters his final year in office, many Americans are still feeling the squeeze of an economy too weak to raise income levels”, Haley said. “But so much of this address was focused on the polarization today and issues upon which Americans have fundamental disagreements”. Period. It’s not even close…
And like the president, the Democratic Senator is downplaying the threat ISIS poses on this country’s future.
“The worldwide system we built after the World War Two is now struggling to keep pace with this new reality”, he said. Rejected the idea that IS threatens “our national existence”. He says that’s the story IS wants to tell and the message it uses in propaganda to recruit. And the president was calling us out.
What the president spoke about? The president made no mention of the unfolding situation in his speech.
Obama addressed a Congress now run by emboldened Republican majorities already planning their agenda under a potential Republican successor, starting with repealing the president’s signature health care law. He encouraged us to us to lay aside whatever divides us and find ways to move forward on common ground, knowing that doing so benefits all of us, including those who depend on our leadership around the world.
He said: “Last year, Vice President (Joe) Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer”.
The New York Times pointed out that the nation has become so divided that Obama’s talk of a resurgent America, with decreasing unemployment and still the most powerful military in the world, is almost the opposite of the America that Republicans see: swarms of criminal migrants taking jobs, an underfunded military, skyrocketing national debt and a lack of “greatness” that needs restoring.
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The president also said there are several Americans who may feel as good about his era as he himself did.
