Hoo boy, after listening to George Junior's State of the Union speech on January 31st, I had to open the windows and let the room air out. No, it wasn't me or the Significant Other, and there's no old dog to blame; it was the endless odiferous repetition of Dubya's Same Old-Same Old fetid distractions, noxious predictions and downright acrid prevarications that were compelling us to haul out the Glade.
Phrases like 'Victory in Iraq,' after nearly three years fermentation in the grisly bog of reality, now have the sour stench of the unburied corpse about them. Standard Dubya fare on the rosy economy have become a nasty bout of dysentery in America's middle-class death march. His talk of taming Iran or other potential future threats is a toxic vapor wafting from a Vietnam-era Port-A-Potty -- he doesn't have the army left, for one thing. His babble of continuing tax cuts for the wealthy is nothing but a rude cheer from a Bronx alimentary canal to a nation sentenced to paying off the debt he's already run up catering to his filthy-rich pals. His complicated new health care proposals, on top of his earlier fine-print Medicare insult to seniors, is a broken sewer pipe in New Orleans, still not fixed after five long months of Republican promises. The only thing the reeking Bush Boy could do now that would demonstrate the slightest whiff of compassion or conservatism would be to resign, and take his administration's whole demented dog-and-pony show of neocon scat with him.
As AlterNet.org's Joshua Holland summed it up neatly in "Dead Man Talking": "After five years running the country, without a single policy he could point to that hasn't turned out to be a failure, George Bush has only one thing left to say: 'My presidency is finished.'"
The speech was the usual mishmash and rehash of previous Bush themes and dreams, only this time more low-rated than any of his previous SOTU flights of fancy; as The Progress Report sub-headed in its Feb. 1st newsletter, "An underwhelmed nation yawns." It's no wonder that Bush pushed for spending money on manned Mars missions in a past SOTU; the Red Planet may be the only place he'll be safe after three more years of his FUBAR administration.
There were only a few moments of the tacky spectacle that caught Tattlesnake's eye, aside from the occasional shot of Dick Cheney, sitting behind Bush's shoulder, trying to hide his sneering Old Man Potter contempt for democracy, and that hideous slack-jawed oaf Dennis Hastert, blubberously perched on the other side of His Most Republican Emperor, apparently wondering when the Wizard of Jeb will find him a brain.
Here's one item: Bush, who has derided those who would exploit his misbegotten Iraq War for 'partisan purposes,' partisanly exploited the family of a dead soldier by making them stand while he grinned at them and the politicos in the chamber applauded as if they cared. During the outburst, MSNBC showed a quick live shot of Dub -- no kidding -- winking one eye while facing in the direction of the family, the sort of wink one gives accompanied by a nudge with an elbow. WTF? Daddy's dead and here's a wink and a leer from the C-in-C? Are Mom and Sis safe in their beds from the 'Invader' of Baghdad? Incidentally, in a later rebroadcast of the speech, that wink was gone; the camera simply remained focused on the exploited family.
Numero Due: All Americans are familiar with how our government treats all users and peddlers of addictive substances, as long as they don't work for the booze or tobacco industries. You've seen it on 'America's Most Wanted'-style TV slimefests again and again: Slam the perp down to the ground while a SWAT team tears apart their home searching for drugs. And dealers are always thuggish criminal kingpins who need to be tossed in jail for life, if not executed. Even the few Constitutional protections we have left prohibiting illegal search and seizure have been tossed aside by the Supreme Court when an addictive substance user and dealer are the targets.
With this is mind, it was puzzling to hear El Presidente Loco refer to our country as "addicted to oil," yet not propose any of the usual War on Drugs solutions to the problem.
If America is crippled by this horrible addiction, just as we are supposedly suffering from addictions to crack, smack and crystal meth, why not have the DEA hanging around gas stations to nab users? Why not send in SWAT teams to the corporate offices of ExxonMobil, PhillipsTexaco and the like and start busting the pushers? (They're sure as hell easier to find than Colombian drug lords.) If Bush thinks this approach is working well to prevent drug addiction, why not employ it for oil addiction as well? Some wholesale arrests and throw-away-the-key incarcerations and you'll have yourself a safe, renewable source of energy lickety-split that doesn't depend on the whims of spoiled Saudi Arabian royalty.
And how about a cabinet-level department similar to the Drug Enforcement Administration to spearhead this crackdown on oil junkies? Call it the Bureau to Retrain Oil Wastrels and Nullify Illicit Energy Sources, or BROWNIES.
With an acronym like that, they'll have the problem cleaned up in no time.
Finally, if Bush actually believes anything he said in this speech, physicists should take note: He is not just in a bubble, he is living in one of the alternate dimensions predicted by the String Theory -- of course, in another one of those dimensions, the vote in Florida in 2000 was fairly recounted, Gore became President, 9/11 never happened because he read the August 6, 2001 CIA brief and took action, America is prosperous and at peace with a surplus instead of a record deficit, and the GOP is desperately trying to find something, anything, with which to impeach Big Al. (Some things never change, not even in quantum physics.)
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Bush’s SOTU Energy Blather…
…of course he “didn’t mean it literally.”
Have you ever noticed how often one of Bush’s underlings has to ‘clarify’ what he’s said? And how often that ‘clarification,’ which is really Bush code for ‘contradiction,’ gets lost in the media shuffle, so that few Americans ever hear it? Gee, think that might be intentional?
Read on from The Progress Report, Feb. 2, 2006:
ENERGY
Bush Didn’t Mean It Literally
President Bush’s admission this week that America is “addicted to oil” has received much attention, and for good reason. Most understand that without rapid and fundamental changes, our continued dependence on fossil fuels will undermine our national security, do grave and irreversible harm to the environment, and generate new and higher costs to be paid by working Americans. Unfortunately, while Bush made promises that sounded sweeping and ambitious, so far, it’s just talk. (For a real roadmap to kicking our oil habit, check out American Progress’s plan, “Resources for Global Growth.”)
THE TRUTH ABOUT BUSH’S CALL TO REDUCE MIDDLE EAST IMPORTS: On Tuesday, President Bush announced a “great goal”: “to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.” But that isn’t as great as it sounds. Consider that foreign imports currently make up about 65 percent of our total oil consumption, but imports from the Middle East constitute just 17 percent of total imports, about 11 percent of total oil use. In other words, President Bush’s goal amounts to reducing oil consumption by just 8.25 percent over 19 years. Moreover, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said yesterday that when President Bush pledged to reduce imports from the Middle East, “he didn’t mean it literally.” Bodman told journalists that Bush’s promise “was purely an example,” acknowledging that “oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms” meaning “it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.” Indeed, according to the administration’s own statistics, Bush’s proposals would be highly unlikely to displace crude oil from the Middle East “because the region has the lowest costs for producing oil in the world and U.S. companies would continue to seek the cheapest source of energy.” Says Energy Department analyst Anthony Radich, “Barring some (government) policy that explicitly discourages oil imports, even if we do find cheaper ways to produce cellulose ethanol, the imports from the Middle East are among the last to go.”
[Emphasis mine.]
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