Wednesday night President Bush delivered his official State of the Union speech. Unofficially it was a funeral oration for what the Democrat Party has become.

He laid it out in a very matter-of-fact, very succinct and easy-to-understand manner. One of his biggest assets is his ability to make it easy for people to understand where he wants to go and where he thinks we need to be and how to get there.

Unfortunately he’s working with a bunch of dummies back in Washington who sit on their hands most of the time, and people like Nancy Pelosi who came into the House chamber with the president, all smiles, as if she were his biggest fan and closest collaborator – when for the past three days she had been doing nothing but lambasting the president about a speech he had not yet given.

The Democrats, it seems, don’t believe in pre-emptive strikes, unless they are aimed at the president. In their response they showed once again that they have no ideas of their own. I like the way Peggy Noonan put it in the Wall Street Journal Friday. “As for the Democratic response,” she wrote, “Harry Reid looks and talks like a small-town undertaker whom you want to trust but wonder about, especially when he says the deceased would love the brass handles.

“Although Nancy Pelosi continues to look startled, even alarmed, her comments are predictable and pedestrian. Both seemed eager not to agree with Ted Kennedy’s recent ‘Iraq is Vietnam’ statements, which more and more seem not just stupid but scandalously so. Absent endorsing radical defeatism, however, Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi had little to say. They made Important Sounds. Neither seemed sincere or serious. The president seemed both.”

As a matter of fact, Harry Reid said it himself – they are not going to come up with their own Social Security plan, because as far as they are concerned the president doesn’t have a real plan, so why should they?

They say now that there is no crisis with the Social Security system, but it was a crisis during the Clinton Administration when he was going to put together a panel to look for a solution to the problems. It was a problem then, the Democrats recognized that it was at the time, and nothing happened. Now when the GOP is doing something about it, they say there is no problem.

The president nailed them when he pointed out that the Congress makes a choice for its members to put money into their own thrift plan, but they do not want the American people to have what they have.

The fact of the matter is the Democrats don’t want the problems of Social Security solved. They see it as their issue and trot it out every election year, warning the American people that those rascally Republicans want to abolish Social Security and drive senior citizens into the poor house. They’d rather have an issue than a solution.

The only debate on the issues today is between various factions of the GOP – right, middle and left – the Democrats have no plans, no ideas and no future.

As I listened to the president I thought that my father would have been blown away by the way George Bush is handling all the slings and arrows aimed at him. He learned his lessons studying Ronald Reagan, and he is taking them to another level.

Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War despite the efforts of many Democrats to thwart his moves against the Soviet Union’s drive to conquer the world. This president will win the war on terrorism, despite the efforts of the Democrats to stand in his way on the road to victory.

The Democrats’ behavior the other night – booing, refusing to join standing ovations, sitting there sullenly – showed they haven’t learned a thing from their utter defeat, losing both houses of Congress, doomed to be a minority party on Capitol Hill for ages to come, and losing the White House. The late Dodger manager Charley Dressen once said of his team’s great rival, “The Giants is dead.”

It doesn’t take a coroner to say today that the Democrats are too.

©2005 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley Cari@cagle.com, (800) 696-7561