The State of the Onion

President Obama is about to give his second "State of the Union" address. Suppose he tells us the truth. These truths:

1. We are impossibly far in debt, and can't even pay the interest on that debt. And yet we keep spending a billion dollars a day, not on our people's health and education, not on feeding our hungry and housing our homeless, not on our crumbling infrastructure, not on renewable energy, but on three wars.

2. Our wars are all three illegal and immoral wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan.

3. We are still running an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.

4. We are still torturing prisoners, including Bradley Manning, a U. S. citizen held illegally in solitary confinement for seven months, tortured--sleep deprivation, manacles, nakedness--and as yet uncharged with any offense.

5. We are still running an illegal kidnapping--"rendition"--program all over the world.

6. We no longer have our constitutionally guaranteed right of Habeas Corpus.

7. We are a terribly violent society, in which guns and gunfire murders are rife throughout the land.

8. Our prisons are overflowing, but millions of criminals--white collar thieves for the most part--are still free.

9. We are obsessed with greed, and while millions and millions of us exist in grinding, inhuman poverty, millions of filthy-rich anti-social anti-citizens sit on millions and millions, billions and tens of billions of dollars.

10. We are a rogue state, a failed society, and a danger to the whole world.

Mr. Obama could recite this "Bill of Wrongs" to begin his State of the Union speech, and then tell us how he would like to address these problems.

If he does, I will support him: with all my patriotic, America-loving heart.