Remember the days of "if you're not with us, you're against us?" Boy, were they sweet. Tucked away in his nonsense about doing his part to create a civil, bipartisan dialogue, last night Bush rolled out yet another way to divide up the country: "You're either for the war, or against foreign aid."

It used to be that being against the war just meant that we hated America. Which, you know, is fine. I mean, I don't hate America, but I've got a thick skin, and I'm not going to get all hacked off if you try to tell me otherwise.

Last night, though, Bush upped the ante. Opposing the war-- and everything that goes with it, like illegal wiretapping and unlawful imprisonment and torture of detainees-- now doesn't just mean you hate America. It means that you also don't want to send aid to refugees or help girls go to school. Don't want to fight? You hate the world.

What's fucked up about this is that if in the first place we'd actually did all of this "showing compassion abroad" and "believing in the God-given dignity and worth of villagers with AIDS" stuff he was talking about last night, we might not be in the place we are right now as a nation or at least would have a lot easier time getting out of it.

Do you know what percent of the budget our government spends on foreign aid? Do you have any idea? Most people think it's like 20%. Most people are very, very wrong. It's less than 1%. Yes, we definitely have a lot of things we need to spend our money on here at home. But just think about it. Imagine the poverty we could have relieved if, say, just ten years ago we started spending even a third of the cost of one year in Iraq on food or education or clean water or family planning, in Pakistan or Sudan or the Palestinian Territories? What if, when a Humvee rolled into a village in Iraq, people cheered because they knew it was full of people who would build sewers and treat disease, not kill them?

What if?

Our president told us last night that America was a "hopeful society," that if we "give in to pessimism" about how poorly the war is going or how badly we failed our own on the Gulf Coast, we are hurting America and hurting the world. Mr. President, we've been hurting America and hurting the world for a long time now, and your "plan" isn't going to make that stop.

Related:
Full Text of the State of the Union