UNSTEADY STATE.(The Talk of the Town)(State of the Union address)

George W. Bush says he wants to go to Mars--a motion that many of his fellow-citizens would heartily second--but he probably doesn't mean it. The speech in which he announced his "New Vision for Space Exploration" was exceedingly vague about how and when the trip was to be made. It did say that in 2015 or maybe in 2020 Americans would be going back to the moon, where they would build a base for "human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond." An official likened this speech to President Kennedy's address of May 25, 1961, in which he asked the nation to "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

A week later came Bush's State of the Union address, the text of which one scans in vain for any mention of Mars, the moon, or space exploration. The subject has already been dropped. (By contrast, Kennedy's 1962 State of the Union reiterated and discussed the lunar excursion he had proposed eight months before.) Nor is a short attention span the only sign of Bush's lack of seriousness about his interplanetary venture. There is also its Wal-Mart price tag. The President is asking Congress for an extra two hundred million dollars per year, about what it costs to make a movie like "Waterworld." Another couple of billion is to be cannibalized out of the existing space budget. This kind of money will get no one to Mars, but that isn't to say that Bush's project will yield no results. It has already led to the cancellation of maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope, nasa's most scientifically valuable project, which means that the Hubble will go blind in three or four years' time. Bush's "New Vision" is a sharp stick in the eye.

Polls published between the two Bush speeches revealed a distinct lack of public enthusiasm for the President's space proposal, and it will be surprising if he mentions it again anytime soon. But "Mars," "the moon," and "space" are not the only words missing in action from the State of the Union. So are "unemployment," "aids," and "the environment." "Deficit" makes but a single appearance, as part of an utterly unconvincing, detail-free assertion that the gigantic budget shortfalls with which Bush has replaced the surpluses he inherited can be halved in five years if Congress would just "focus on priorities."

The word "war," on the other hand, makes a dozen appearances in the speech, while "terror" and its derivatives appear twenty times. The surrounding contexts suggest that Bush and his political handlers plan to use 9/11 and its aftermath every bit as ruthlessly this year as they did in 2002, when Republicans captured control of the Senate by portraying Democrats as friends of terrorism. (The most prominent victim of this strategy was Senator Max Cleland, of Georgia, who lost three limbs fighting in Vietnam, and who was defeated by ads showing his face alongside those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.) In 2004, according to Bush, "we face a choice: we can go forward with confidence and resolve, or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us." If the choice he is talking about is November's (and what else could it be?), then this is slander. The illusion that Bush describes is shared by none of the four remaining Democratic candidates with a chance at nomination. Nor, by the way, do any of them doubt that the Iraqi people are better off without the regime of Saddam Hussein. And, while all four are for other reasons critical of Bush's Iraq policies, all recognize that, like it or not, the ...