"Tonight the state of our union is strong, and together we will make it stronger."

Those were the first -and last - words of President Bush's State of the Union speech I heard Tuesday night, being completely unable to stomach anything else after hearing such a fallacious statement in the first little audio snippet I played.

How can our administration, and we as a people, continue to pretend that our country isn't on the brink of total collapse? And to suggest that we're doing anything "together," as if we were a nation united, is utter lunacy.

Globally, our foreign policy has been a total debacle and resulted in an untold number of senseless deaths and wasted effort. Our efforts in the "war on terror" have done nothing to stop the root causes of terrorism and done little more than provide new fertile training grounds for the fanatics who seek to disrupt our way of life.

Instead of working to actually destroy Al Qaeda, we diverted essential troops to Iraq, where we've become an occupying force and turned a once secular - albeit totalitarian - state into one full of religious extremists and fanatic patriots bent on pushing us from their holy lands. It's a lose-lose dilemma our leaders should never have misled us into. Now we either we stay there forever - which morally and financially we cannot afford to do - or we leave - now or in 10 years - inviting our enemies to consider it a victory.

The alleged sweeping democratic reform of the Middle East is a farce as well, as exhibited last week with the Palestinian legislative elections. In the one region where people have the right to vote in legitimate elections, the majority chose to elect an anti-U.S., terrorist organization to represent them. Naturally, our government has refused to negotiate with them, even though they represent the will of the people.

What do we do when the same thing happens in Iraq or whatever nation is next on our hit list? What point are we missing when the democracies we helped install tell us to pack our bombs and shove off?

In the eyes of the international community, we're a nation of fools being led by an impatient child in the midst of a nasty tantrum and his gang of bullies.

Domestically, the situation is almost as bad. Every day the bastions of American industry announce layoffs, benefit reductions and the closing of production facilities in an effort to stem the hemorrhaging of capital. With recent announcements by Ford and GM, it seems cars - the last product even built (and I use that term loosely, as most of the individual parts are made elsewhere) in the U.S. - are going the way of the dinosaur.

As more and more funds are diverted to our dalliances abroad, less and less is made available for important social service programs, leaving towns without money for important improvement projects and disadvantaged people on fixed incomes asking themselves "To heat or to eat?"

To see this impact locally, look no further than the Hartwick water district, where moderate to low-level income citizens are being forced to absorb a hefty increase in their water bill, because state and federal assistance for the water improvement project dried up.

Desperate times are here now and the future looks grim indeed. We can continue to sit back, watching the self-destruction live in high definition on our big-screen TVs or we can oust the motley band of Red and Blue fools in Washington and Albany and begin the work of repairing this once-great nation.

I just hope it isn't too late.