As I walked through the press entrance and saw all the Talent for Senate signs, I felt like a Red Sox fan walking into a Yankees home game.

But instead of sitting amongst the crowd, I was escorted to the press cage, which was chock full of scowling middle-aged white males and younger seemingly career driven females. This almost felt like home, especially since it was the only part of the crowd that didn’t clap and cheer every time the president paused during his speech.

Now, as a lot of people know, I am not a big fan of the president (or any Republican for that matter). However, somehow Bush almost had me going for a while. He brought up a lot of issues that I hadn’t really thought about. He mentioned how we can use Missouri grown agricultural products for renewable resources. And he mentioned how the Republicans plan not to raise taxes. He also mentioned a health insurance plan that would give small businesses a chance to buy insurance packages as cheap as big businesses do.

Another plus was how he and the Republican Party lowered the national debt, and are bringing more jobs back to Americans.

But that was only the first third of the speech. He actually lasted, to my knowledge, a full 17 minutes without bringing up the “elephant in the living room.”

This is when he took a turn for the worse. He then proceeded to use the words Iraq and 9/11 every 30 seconds for the last 25 minutes of his speech.

He insisted Democrats want to leave Iraq, and if we do then terrorists will come here and attack us. He also said the war in Iraq doesn’t create terrorists. But to my knowledge if you blow up someone’s home and kill their family members, in turn they will probably stop liking you. This could be a possible way to create terrorists.

But that’s not my hold-up. My problem is how he continues to mention Iraq, the war on terrorism and 9/11 to scare Americans into voting Republican.

As if the Democratic Party will let terrorists come into our homes and kill each and every one of us. It’s not that I am Democrat, because I have gone down that road and realized most politicians are liars regardless of their party affiliation.

But scaring people into voting for your party is not a good campaign agenda. A campaign should be run on what is this politician going to do for me. But with all the political mud-slinging filling the commercial breaks of every TV station, it’s obvious we’ll never have an election untainted by negativity.

And to me that’s just wrong.