My Reaction to the SOUA

As I was reading the 2003 SOUA, I noticed that I was responding in a rather cynical way. Everything I read was being "yeah-righted" in my head. Once I realized that I was doing it, I tried to examine the reasons that made me so cynical towards anything the leader of our country says. It wasn't like I was pulling up specifics to support my cynicism, it was more like...feelings. And I realized, this could be the result of that "ambient persuasion" that Ramage discussed in Chapter 4. I am not a heavy follower of politics, although maybe I should be. But I do hear things, like opinions, debates, and issues, through the media and other people. Perhaps these things have created, through repetition and time, opinions in my mind that affected me while I was reading the SOUA. For example, the part where Bush proposes enviromental reforms got a huge "YEA RIGHT" from me. Maybe that is a result of hearing, over time, different instances where he did not support enviromental reforms. That could be one way of looking at ambient persuasion.

Then again, I could also be cynical because the speech came off as rather propagandic to me. Bush spent a seemingly puny amount of the speech addressing national concerns like health care, homelessness, unemployment, and taxation. It seemed like he threw in these issues at the beginning to kind of "get them over with" before he moved on to the really important issue of the day: Iraq. Throughout the majority of his section on the Iraqi threat he fails to present the other side of the story. He hardly ever discusses the negative aspects of war, and there are plenty, but stresses the need to act. He does not present alternatives to war. Seems like propaganda to me. He made war sound so inevitable, that I wondered if the American people ever really had a choice in the matter.