The state of the union is just miserable, no matter how President Obama sugarcoats it. He will claim that progress has been made in stabilizing the markets, increasing national security and advancing toward meaningful health care reform, but he will be wrong on all three counts.

What he will be right about is that none of these problems were originally of his creation, and that the opposition party wants to exacerbate rather than solve any of them - believing, as they do, in that destructive maxim of desperate losers who find their salvation in the stumbles of the winners.

There is no doubt that Obama and his party represent the lesser evil, but it is deeply disturbing to have to defend the leaders of our nation in those terms. They were supposed to lead us to peace, but as the cables from the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, printed in The New York Times on Monday, make absolutely clear, the escalation in Afghanistan is tantamount to a disaster without end. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who was previously the top American commander in Afghanistan, warned: "Sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable."

Obama distracted progressives with a grand crusade for health care reform that reasserted the fundamental fallacy of the previous health reform effort of the Clinton years: Give the insurance companies a captive universal market under the absurd illusion that we can control costs without undermining their greed with a competitive government-run option.

The same is the case with the collapse of the economy, as Obama shamefully continued the Bush administration's mugging of U.S. taxpayers by throwing trillions of dollars at the Wall Street bandits who caused the financial meltdown. Meanwhile, 7 million Americans have lost their jobs and 15 million families owe more on their homes than they are worth.

Advertisement Someday our president, whom I still regard as a decent and well-intentioned politician, will have to confront the demons of that fatal opportunism that led him to turn over the economy to the likes of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, who can most charitably be described as hugely successful Wall Street pimps. Obama knows of Summers' devilish role, during his time in the Clinton administration, in pushing the radical deregulation of the markets that the president blamed last week for our economic debacle. And he is aware that the TARP inspector general is hot on Geithner's heels for his role, as head of the New York Fed, in the funneling of $62 billion dollars through AIG to Goldman Sachs and the other bonus payout alchemists.

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