Reality is for Suckers
Ah, fantasy.
Everybody has one. Some have several.
The President certainly has his. He’s been accused repeatedly throughout his tenure of being blinded by ideology to the reality of situations.
Over and over, people in the government who disagree with his course of action have been summarily dismissed, retired, or resigned.
Case in point: After the midterm “thumpin’” when Bush-policy-supporting Republicans were swept out like black people in New Orleans by voters who were fed up with the direction of the Iraq war, Bush, in a moment of apparent clarity, finally threw Rumsfeld under the bus and brought in Robert Gates as the new Secretary of Defense. People applauded that their president actually was finally connected to reality (says a lot that “being aware of reality” is something to applaud in the most powerful man on Earth) and was actually listening to their concerns.
Then, the Iraq Study Group, composed by Bush’s own father and longtime family friend James Baker – in a last ditch effort to save his political ass - (and which did not have one single Middle East expert amongst them) came out with their findings, which suggested, among other things, that the U.S. scale down their operations in Iraq and set a timetable to withdraw. All things that we the people who spoke so loud and clear on the issue in the elections wanted to hear.
Then on his very first day on the job, Bush sent Gates to Iraq. Gates spoke to numerous generals about the possible escalation of the war – the exact opposite of what the ISG suggested.
The generals knew this idea was terrible, that more Iraqi troops are needed, not American troops. They expressed these concerns to their new civilian boss.
And BOOM! It was announced this week that Generals Abizaid and Casey are out, and being replaced by General David Petraeus, who, big f*ckin’ surprise, agrees with the President on the need for escalation (The Idiot can’t escape the idea that just like in a corporate world, often in the military one pretends to agree with the boss in order to get ahead).
Whatever Bush’s reasons for escalation and staying in this quagmire, defending his legacy, the oil (which has been opened up to western corporations, whoda thunk), pure stubbornness, or he actually believes his “they’ll follow us here” rhetoric, he has made clear he has chosen the path of fantasy over facts.
And now that the Dems have taken over congress, he’s shown that he’s taking on the path of fantasy at home, too. In his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal just before the new congress was sworn in, he asked for bipartisanship and cooperation by the Democrats (you know, after he campaigned against them and said that a win for them is a win for Al Qaida), asking them to work with him on several issues, and in order to prevent future overspending, that they give him line-item veto powers.
A little ‘splainin – the line-item veto is a presidential power that presidents have been asking for since the beginning of the country but have never been given, in which the President can go through spending bills by Congress and delete whichever parts of the bill he doesn’t like. Generally, most spending bills are full of pork, projects congressmen include to bring money and jobs to their communities and often add millions of unnecessary spending.
But no president has EVER been given line-item veto power. And Emperor Cahones, who very recently compared Democrats to terrorists, and then said he would work with them after they were elected, is now asking them to grant him unprecedented power over them. And I bet he actually thinks he’s gonna get it.
Oh, yeah, and this was right after he issued a signing statement on a Postal bill saying he has the right to open up our mail without asking.
I’m sure that in other places, in other times, this was reality.
But it’s not now.
The fantasy extends to his supporters who remember the salad days of huge popular support, when they were in the majority. Someone should tell people in this .08% of the population that they are in the vast minority now.
Your mocking little bumper sticker isn’t quite as effective as it used to be.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
