No, I'm sick to my stomach thanks to the outrageous exploitative sideshows, petulant finger-wagging, and of course some of the outright lies that made up the State of the Union Address.
- Contrary to
popular opinionright-wing slander, Democrats care about our troops, too, probably more than some people at the Pentagon do. We honor their commitment, and we appreciate -- and mourn -- their sacrifices. However, this use of The First Lady's Box™ as a clearinghouse for sensationalist human advertising is getting a little tacky. The late Staff Sgt. Dan Clay's family was invited to the coveted position, but what about all of the other families of the fallen? How do you pick one family? Through proper vetting of their unflinching political support? There was just something truly unsettling about the way they were put on display for the State of the Union Address, as if Bush was trying to hide behind their sacrifice: "If you challenge my war, your dishonor the sacrifice this beautiful family has made. Do you hate these nice people? You do, you Democrats hate this lovely widow and these grieving parents. Shame on you." No, Mr. President, shame on you. That was just tacky. - Apparently, questioning one particular war over another and the tactics employed in it make Democrats "isolationists," who want to "retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life." I'd challenge that by pointing out the Democrats have their own policy vision of how to keep this nation safe from attack and promote American democratic ideals abroad, but wait, the right wing pundits keep reminding me that Democrats don't have any policies. Never mind. Color me rejectionist, you narrow-minded binary-limited black-and-white so-and-so.
- "...and we! are! winning!" Apparently everything is on the up-and-up in Iraq. Things like insurgent attacks, up 29% last year! Hours per week when the power is out, also up (like 400%)! Iranian influence? Up the yazzoo! Oh, but you know what's not up? Oil production. No wonder this war isn't paying for itself...
- "We now know that two of the hijackers in the United States placed telephone calls to al Qaeda operatives overseas. But we did not know about their plans until it was too late." Correct, Mr. President, but NOT because you lacked the warrant to listen in on the phone call. You HAD the phone call. Why do you think we had it lying around for the 9/11 Commission to report on? You just hadn't had time to translate and analyze it! If you want to win this war, quit dishonorably discharging military Arabic translators for being gay and pay attention to the intelligence you're already getting -- and quit lying about 9/11 to justify your stretched out executive power.
- Mr. President, you have got to drop this "cut the deficit in half by 2009" garbage, because we all already know it's phony baloney. If I could say "I'm going to pay off my credit cards by March" and yet leave out my discretionary beer-and-burgers-at-the-Vortex line items, I'd be in like Flynn. But you've got to pay for the wars overseas somehow.
- Free speech is of course a crime under the Bush administration. Cindy Sheehan gets hauled out of the House and thrown in jail without even being asked to cover or change her very non-profane t-shirt. Rock on, Thought Police!
- President Bush wakes up in the morning and hears Coretta Scott King has died. What is his natural reaction? "Hey, why don't we work that into the speech somewhere -- I know, let's draw a parallel between my preemptive war strategery with Martin Luther King's civil rights movement! Gawlly I'm smart. Eh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh." That was about the most disgusting thing I've ever heard come out of this president's mouth, and he's said some pretty disgusting stuff.
- Speaking of disgusting stuff, where in the blue heck did the threat of "human-animal hybrids" come from? Should I be reading Weekly World News? Or has the president and his speech writing staff (such as it is) been watching too much Surface on NBC? Well, whatever the hell a human-animal hybrid is, I'm sure Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum is having sexual nightmares about it.
- Call me skeptical, but you will not be driving a hydrogen-powered car anytime soon, certainly not with a whopping federal commitment of $25 million per year (and yes, as a matter of fact I am a rocket scientist). And an average $2 billion a year on the entirety of our alternative energy studies? That is not something to be proud of. Weaning us off the violent teat of fossil fuels is going to require an effort on the order of the Apollo moon landing -- and even that, at a modest $135B in today's money, is only half of what we've already blown on the war in Iraq.
- And speaking of technology initiatives, President Bush "proposed" one last night that sounds awfully familiar. Say, didn't the Democrats unveil an Innovation Agenda last Fall? Well, Mr. President, it's nice to see you're finally catching up to our ideas! Oh, wait, damn -- once again, I've forgotten that Democrats don't have any actual policies, so I guess technically Bush couldn't have stolen our ideas if we don't have any ideas of our own, right? Jeez. Silly me. You THIEF.
1 Comments:
HEY! I don't want to hear any more of that crap from our people! You have been listening to so much right wing spin, you're starting to believe it, too? Snap out of it, Christine! Democrats don't "lack any stand on key issues." You know, I think I've figured out what the problem is (God, those Republipundits are clever, curse them). Seems they've discovered that if they keep repeating "All the Democrats stand for is opposing Bush," and its variants, it sounds like we have no positions of our own. But here's the thing: when your opponent has a sucky position on everything, taking the opposite of the sum total of his views is an entire platform unto itself.
So quit parroting their one-liner BS and making us feel down on ourselves. You're damn right our positions can be neatly packaged as the negation of the matrix of the Bush Agenda!
* YES we are AGAINST the Republicans because we are FOR actually funding vital research into alternative energy!
* YES we are AGAINST the Bush White House becasue we are FOR defending this country from terrorists by actually responding to the 9/11 Commission recommendations, and doing so within the law!
* YES we are AGAINST the Republican culture of corruption, because we are FOR lower home heating oil prices for working families; FOR affordable health care programs that don't line the pockets of pharmacorporations; FOR a living wage so that Wal*Mart employees can take care of their children instead of boosting their employers' multi-million dollar bonuses; FOR coal mines that let fathers come home alive to their children because the Mine Safety and Health Administration actually does its job and is not handed over to the former owner of a dangerous, poorly-run mine; FOR compliance with fuel efficiency standards for government vehicles because the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality is not a hand-picked oil industry executive .
Is that starting to sound like we take a stand on some things?
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