Steroids and the State of the Union address

Two bloggers I admire and usually agree with, Daniel Drezner and Pejman Yousefzadeh, both ridiculed the portion in the second half of Dubya's State of the Union address last night regarding steroid abuse by professional athletes, and many others in and out of the blogosphere have as well. 

Here's the relevant blurb from the speech itself, with the prior paragraph included for important context about drug-testing in other circumstances:

One of the worst decisions our children can make is to gamble their lives and futures on drugs. Our government is helping parents confront this problem, with aggressive education, treatment, and law enforcement. Drug use in high school has declined by 11 percent over the past two years. Four hundred thousand fewer young people are using illegal drugs than in the year 2001. In my budget, I have proposed new funding to continue our aggressive, community-based strategy to reduce demand for illegal drugs. Drug testing in our schools has proven to be an effective part of this effort. So tonight I propose an additional 23 million dollars for schools that want to use drug testing as a tool to save children's lives. The aim here is not to punish children, but to send them this message: We love you, and we don't want to lose you.

To help children make right choices, they need good examples. Athletics play such an important role in our society, but, unfortunately, some in professional sports are not setting much of an example. The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball, football, and other sports is dangerous, and it sends the wrong message — that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character. So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches, and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of steroids now.

And here's my reply to those who ridiculed this as being inappropriate for a State of the Union address (which I've earlier left in comments on Drezner's and Pej's blogs as well):

Re steroids:

Dubya is indeed a former big-league sports team co-owner, but with the additional credibility of speaking from the best bully pulpit in the universe. With less than one minute in an hour-long speech, he threw down the gauntlet to challenge all sports team owners (and players and unions, but mostly the owners) to take the obvious steps to fix an epidemic. They would have to be nuts to ignore him. Having been so challenged, they can fix the problem if they have the will to do so.

Benefit to the American public, especially the youth who care nothing for politics but look to professional athletes as their role models: Incalculable, but potentially very considerable.

Cost to the American taxpayer: ZERO. New federal agencies required to administer the program: ZERO. Legislation that must be passed to implement the program: ZERO.

Your beef with this is ... ? What, you're pro-steroid? You think the health of America's youth is too trivial an issue to be worth one minute of the State of the Union address?

You guys have no grasp of strategery, and you keep misunderestimating Dubya. One doesn't have to be a nukular physicist to see what Dubya was up to here.

I simply think Dubya is ahead of the curve on this one.

Note, too, in the preceding paragraph that the proposed cash "for schools that want to use drug testing as a tool to save children's lives" is, by federal budget standards, chump change, but more importantly, part of an optional program (unlike testing for No Child Left Behind) for those schools that want it.  That is a small, but important and very sweet, distinction.