Dry Drunk Emperor

I, for one, have no desire in making this a political blog. But, with midterm elections on the horizon, I thought it would be fun to take a stroll down memory lane and relive how our president spent his "political capital" over the past two years. And I am not even going to discuss Iraq, which has been called "the biggest corruption scandal in history."

• On December 26, 2004, a massive tsunami struck the northern coast of Sumatra, killing over 150,000. For three days, our president did not comment publicly on the disaster. Four months later when a Florida state circuit judge ruled that Michael Schiavo could remove his wife's feeding tube, Bush cut short his vacation for the first time ever to sign a bill moving jurisdiction of the case to federal courts. This was after all "a great political issue." Oh, and who can forget the good doctor, Bill Frist, who claimed on the senate floor, "I have looked at the video footage. Based on the footage provided to me, which was part of the facts of the case, she does respond." Or Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan who compared "the pull-the-tube people" with Nazis. Way to go! Use those internet message board analogies! Let's not forget Bill Bennett who argued his way out of of that Republican pro-family foxhole by claiming that the Schiavo's had a bad marriage. Classy! And this farce would not be complete without a little bit of that good ole fashioned hypocrisy that only DeLay can pull off: in 1988, DeLay, along with his family, decided not to prolong the life of his father who had been severely injured in a driving accident.
  
  
• Speaking of DeLay, let's not forget his support of Saipan, an island that became a U.S. Commonwealth in 1986, but still somehow evades those terrible labor standards and immigration laws that make America so unfriendly to business. Minimum wage: $3.05! This, by the way, is how your favorite "Made in America" clothing manufactures get away with sweatshop labor. The 20/20 expose on the island revealed the unbearable working conditions, the coercive sexual labor, and the forced abortions. In 1997, DeLay claimed the island was "a shining light for what is happening in the Republican party." Of course what do you expect from a man whose best friend, Jack Abramoff, once said of the Saginaw Chippewa: "These mofos are the stupidest idiots in the land for sure." Kudos boys!
  
  
• Only one thing needs to be said about the Social Security reform fiasco: in order to reach the $11 trillion dollar of unfunded liability statistic the administration kept harping upon, one would have to extend the longevity of each recipient to 150 years and keep the retirement age at 67. Talk about reading the Bible litereally! But that is not even the best part! The $11 trillion dollar figure reflected the Social Security shortfall, adjusted for inflation, from now to infinity. To infinity!
  
  
• Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, about Katrina: "I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw the headlines: 'New Orleans Dodged the Bullet.'" Nuff said.
  
  
• Cheney shot a guy in the face. With a shotgun.
  
  
• The National Debt has increased an average of $1.63 billion per day since September 30, 2005. That is one YouTube a day! Get those karaoke videos churning boys! We have to save the economy.
  
  
• And this is cheating because it came out in a New York Times article months before the election, but it is a personal favorite of mine:
  
  "In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
  
  The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

I'll stop there because I am sure you can find better resources than me on the web.

Here is to 2007, and beyond!