Monday, January 30, 2006

The Speech Bush Should Give

My first column as an op-ed writer for the University of Maryland's Diamondback runs today, addressing tomorrow's State of the Union.
On Tuesday President Bush will, for the sixth time, deliver the State of the Union address. News reports state he is still working on his big speech. Luckily for him, I’ve taken the liberty of preparing the remarks he should deliver tomorrow night:

Good evening and thank you all for being here. Originally, I planned to come out and talk about the “war on terror” in a superficial manner, sprinkled with a liberal dose of tough rhetoric. Then, to further pander to the FOX News crowd, I was going to talk about tax cuts. Luckily for the rest of you, my good friend Jay intervened. He suggested that what the majority of American people are looking for is for me to be open and straightforward with them. Tonight, I promise I will not “spin,” I will not smirk and I will not mispronounce the n-word. “Newkillyear” … “nyookiller” … well, nevermind.

[Click to read the rest of "The Real State of the Union"]

In accordance with the Diamondback's rules on professionalism, I ask that family members and non-UM friends post any comments on this blog page rather than on the school paper's site.

Additionally, some of you may notice a similarity between Friday's Thomas Friedman column and my own. Rest assured, I am not the next Jayson Blair (who, incidentally, was a Maryland alum and former Diamondback editor). The Diamondback's publication schedule is such that I initially submitted my column last Monday, a full week ago, and four days before I saw Friedman's piece. Great minds think alike?

Writing for a student newspaper is different from blogging; anyone have ideas?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice, nice. Sadly the nytimes sucks, so after implying that I WOULD be able to read the column by registering for free, they then informed me that in fact I would actually still NOT be able to. So, couldn't compare your columns.

Anyway, I enjoyed your Diamondback column, nicely done. The one thing that I wasn't sure of was what you were saying with "Remember, the United States has not suffered a...", it didn't seem to quite fit directly with the preceding paragraph. I suppose that we should keep being strong because otherwise our record since 9/11 would be in danger? It just seemed a bit of a jump to go from vigilance (i.e. there's still a constant threat) to that line, which seemed like "hey we've been good for five years whats to worry about" almost.

Despite all my overanalysis, very nice indeed!