Bush And His Barrels Full Of Bull
There is much to be disgusted with in Bush’s Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal today, but I’ll just pick out a few of the nuggets that pissed me off the most. I won’t even bother with the fact that no one should listen to this man or his opinions considering he’s been wrong about everything, big and small, since taking office six years ago. And since he virtually ignored his quagmire in Iraq, except to conflate Iraq with 9/11, I guess I will too, at least for today.
One of my favorite quotes in this op-ed comes with his justification for cutting government programs in order to give more tax cuts (to the already wealthy of course). Bush explains, “I believe government plays an important role in helping those who can't help themselves. Yet we must always remember that when people are hurting, they need a caring person, not a government bureaucracy.”
When Man of American Dissent and I were new parents, adjusting to living on one income, it wasn’t a caring person that helped pay our electric bill, it was a government “bureaucracy” instituted by a caring government that did that. It wasn’t a caring person that provided milk, cereal and dried beans to feed our child, it was WIC, a government “bureaucracy” that did that. And it wasn’t a caring person that provided me with money to finish my college education so that I help provide a better future for my family, it was federal grants and federal student loans that made that possible.
It’s great to have caring people around us to help out when we need emotional support, but it is critical that we organize our government in a way that allows those who need it most, to access it easily. Government programs work, especially if you have caring people supporting them. If George Bush cared a little more about our government, and by extension the people our government serves, perhaps so many Americans wouldn’t be struggling to make ends meet and constantly fearing the possibility that the programs that are essential to our personal survival will be slashed or worse, done away with altogether.
This op-ed is just one more example of how out of touch our president is with the American people and with reality. We want to know when he’s going to give up on his dilusion of “winning” in Iraq. We want to know when the healthcare crisis is going to be addressed! We want to know what is going to be done about the hemorrhaging of family wage jobs flowing away from our shores. And there is no way in hell we trust this president with a line item veto! It would just be one more power for him to abuse.
Perhaps the most disgusting part of this piece is the audacity of this president’s continuing effort to push the mythical connection between Iraq and 9/11. It’s infuriating to have our president constantly lying to us, but it’s insulting when he tells the same debunked lie over, and over again. What’s next, a press conference showing the video of Saddam hanging with a caption that reads “Final Justice For Osama bin Laden”? He may be just that stupid, but the number of us that are willfully ignorant of this president’s failures, is shrinking. By playing the same, sad hand, Bush will only accelerate his race to the bottom. I still can’t believe it’s taken him this long to get there.
posted by The (liberal)Girl Next Door @ 9:20 AM
15 Comments:
Ot-
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53590
buchanan on interventionism and our future.
I wonder how much this has to do with how one perceived one's parents.
Do Republicans see their parents as officious old fuddy-duddies with endless red-tape about drinking, curfews, and dating? Do they then consider government to be equally constricting?
This is why some government programs were designed as entitlements. The uncaring bureaucrat loved means tests and making citizens in need beg. The caring bureaucrat declared all should qualify and any overpayment would be taxed back later.
That's the problem with the Republican vision of America: it relies heavily on "God", "The Invisible Hand", or "Pie in the Sky". Who and where can one find this caring person? Who pays this caring person, who hired this caring person, where does one take a complaint about this caring person?
Let's face reality. The only people who don't want oversight are the crooks. The only people who don't want government programs for the poor are the rich-- who are also the only ones who benefit from tax cuts. And the only ones who hate "government bureaucracy" are the ones who actually hate democracy and the power of the people to set the rules of the game.
It's the Republican vision that has ruined professional sport. It's the Republican vision that has ruined the Christian Church. It's a vision that says nobody does anything unless they're paid. It's a vision devoid of Civic Pride, Human Decency, and Love.
Oh, the Republicans love to toss about the platitudes, but that's for the suckers who hate gays, feminists, and foreigners. All the Republicans understand is Money and how to get their dirty mitts on more Money. And Liberty, Equality, and the Pursuit of Happiness are meaningless concepts to them because they can't be priced, marketed, and sold. Republicans have no humility; they are the greatest sinners of all.
George, who never met a spending bill he didn't love, now pretends that the last 6 years never happened.
Line-item veto, huh? Isn't that, like, unconstitutional? Not that that would stop him, but it's pretty settled law, isn't it?
But the real question is if he even read the article, or if he just had one of his aids submit it sight unseen.
i hope the bush crime family is on its way out but with the american people still having their heads up their asses - not understanding that this country has been overtaken by a coup and studying intensely what this really means - well, then it's going to be more of the same.
speaking of honesty, let's look at what's really going on: there's a serious multi-billionaire mobster syndicate that's global. everyone you see supporting the iraq war is one of these mobsters in one form or another. the usa is the country which was the most easy to take over because it being the "super power" with the "military industrial complex" which obviously belongs to the "ruling elite" and the bush crime family mostly in control because they own the cia as a "private" entity. yes, this is bush speaking really, to those who would keep all the money in their pockets and let as many commoners die, just as long as there are enough and with his best friend in mexico sending all that cheap labor over here, well hell, who needs the stupid americans!
ok folks, now we're into the word games - who gives the titles away - billionaires, ruling elite, etc.?
we do folks, that's right you and me and the rest of us commoners, those of us who refuse to stop giving our money to these lunatics so they can continue to enslave us - a revolution? stop working and write every mortgage lender as well as credit card company, telling them that we know how much they lie, cheat and steal from us and therefore, these mobsters get nothing from us.
greenspan is a best friend of the bush crime family. who gave the unbridled spending pass to george? oh my, that bad boy alan, after all, doesn't he do what the web site of the fed says - to protect the economy of the american people, etc.
privatization folks. the bush crime family has been at this for a long, long time and all their nefarious globalcriminal partners trusted them to pull this whole new world order plan off, by way of privatization and this is who bush was talking to in his media blitz - once again his "base."
you want to stop this madness - stop commerce. no ruling elite can live without the commerce of the commoners providing for them, their free lunches.
a revolution is necessary alright and it's simply stop providing these insane people with the power we've given them - our work product plus interest paid on counterfeit money and therefore they get their free lunches for ever and ever and they don't mind our wailing just as long as we get our asses to work and pay the interest we owe them for their smarts in cheating us so!
LGND - I'd just like to make a slight adjustment to your analysis. While you had your husband had a child you couldn't afford it was ME (the American People) that gave you money, not WIC. WIC didn't earn money, it just collected it from ME. Me as an individual has waited now until I am 39 yrs old to have a child b/c I made sure I could afford it first.
Anonymous--And we have more than paid back any money we may have received. Because of the small investment our government made in my family, we contribute more tax dollars than we ever could have without the help we received. If you don't like the idea of helping people for the sake of helping them, just think about it as getting more bang for your buck!
I've heard conservatives complain about lowering the student loan interest rates with much the same arguement, "that's just shifting the burden from students to the rest of us". Yeah, and so what? Who are these college students but current (and future) taxpayers! Let's give them a chance to get started, they will more than pay us back in the long run.
And by the way, unlike men, women don't always have the option of waiting until they are almost 40 to have kids. We run out of time, biologically speaking. If I'd waited until I was 39, I'd have been SOL.
LGND - Nice justification. So you get to borrow from me until you are able to contribute. That's nice. I was just making the point the you DIDN'T get money from WIC, you got it from ME. I'm glad you used that money to get a better life, but LOTS of people just abuse the system forever. Fiscal responsibility is as much a part of having children as anything. If you weren't able to afford children until it was too late, so be it, that is YOUR responsibility. If you reached an age where having your own children was not possible, you could always adopt (as many young people who are unable do).
Again, I am glad you changed your life around and are a contributor instead of an abuser.
Little late here but I feel it really must be said:
Hey Anonymous,
LGND was *never* an "abuser" of the system. Your mealy-mouthed assertion that she turned her life around from abuser to contributor is so unbelievably offensive to me that I can hardly see straight.
Those systems exist for a reason - sometimes people need help. Maybe you never have - lucky, lucky you and your dried-up, antipathetic little soul. But quit kidding yourself - YOU didn't give her anything. You gave the Government the money, and it became their money. Just like when you pay something at a store - the money, once handed over, ceases to be yours and becomes the store's money. And before you start bloviating about it being "your government, you paid for it!" let me just remind you that a Democracy reflects (or should reflect) the will of The People - not the whims and caprices of every single person. It's not YOUR government - it's OUR government. It's not YOUR money. It's the Government’s money. So when LGND received assistance, YOU had nothing to do with it. Had YOU been asked, doubtless you would have said something like "Let the irresponsible young mother and her baby reap what they have sown. Let them sit in dark. Let them starve. Let them never better their lives. Let them suffer forever for whatever mistakes/choices/circumstances have landed them in such a hard place. They are clearly immoral, incautious, no account abusers. I refuse to enable them." Or maybe you would have just said "No" but in the end it's all the same. It wasn't your charitable, caring nature that gave them a hand up - it was WIC.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there are people out there who do abuse assistance programs – but to insinuate that ANYONE who has ever been helped by government programs is an abuser – well that’s both gross and totally wrongheaded. Besides, I’d rather have a system that a small percentage of people abuse than no system in place at all.
And if it matters – I’ve never been on any type of public assistance. But I’m not so foolish as to think I could never be in a position where I needed a helping hand. For most of us, it's not far to fall.
In summation Anonymous (and Pres. Bush for that matter) - please cram it.
I am sooooo partial to these words from the Preamble . The bold emphasis is by me.
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Even though T. Jefferson was in France, as ambssador, it is very likely that the writers really meant what they put on the paper to reflect his thoughts from the Declaration of Independence. It is very clear also that nothing is written about maybe, like later on, possibly eliminating welfare, general or specific or otherwise.
It is people like anonymous who are abusers of the system. These abusers always act as if they were paying the entire Congressional budget.
I laughed when I read that ME paid LGND and not WIC. First, it assumes 'anonymous' makes enough to pay into the system --something not in evidence; and second, that 'anonymous' pays in enough to have covered all that WIC gave LGND.
In truth, such people have an incredibly naive view of wealth. The Republican attitude that tax cuts stimulate the economy is false. Small amounts have no effect whatsover. It is by freeing up the latent wealth in someone like LGND through WIC that more wealth is generated.
The 'anony-mouses' of this world don't see themselves as stewards who were given something by the previous generation and must hand something on to the next. They are like the bitter pills who live in "No Children" condos.
The 'anonyomouses' of this world don't really want to be citizens. They are the abusers because they welcome a free lunch when offered it but then balk at chipping in when it's their turn. They're the office worker who always helps himself to a second donut, but never buys the next box.
I laugh when LGND talks about programs being cut. The federal budget is higher than it has ever been. GW has spent more money on more government programs than any President in history. Given all that the likes of LGND is "more, more, more".
Since supposedly GW's tax cuts only went to the wealthy I will like to welcome LGND to the "wealthy class". Please ask her if she received any benefit from the cut in the lowest marginal tax rates and the doubling of the child tax credit. Depending on how many crumb crunchers LGND has she benefited quite nicely from it.
Simple question. If the tax cuts only went to the wealthy why did the percentage of total taxes paid by the top 1% actually go up? Also, why do millions more individuals pay no income taxes at all?
drm, the reason Dubya oversees the largest deficits in US history is because he's squandered billions of dollars on war profiteering companies like Halliburton and Blackwater who would be blackballed by the BBB if they were small businesses.
I sincerely doubt LGND has seen any of this pork. It seems to go to the obscenely wealthy. And it's an old Republican trick to boast of the great benefits given by new programs to the poor that only exist only on paper!
And don't play the percentages game. (Lies, damn lies, and....) The reason the wealthiest 1% paid more in taxes (and you don't mention which taxation years) is because they copped even more of the pie. And the reason there are more who don't pay taxes is because they're penniless and living on the street.
And one more thing Anonymous, you have proved my point. The "caring people" George W. Bush wrote about in his op-ed, you know, the ones that will lend a helping hand to those around them in need, are few and far between (at least on his side of the aisle) and what he really means is someone other than him, a sentiment you seem to share.
And for the record, I didn't "turn my life around" as you describe it. I got my first job at 15, worked as I made my way through my first two years of college (at which point I decided it was just too much and opted to just work instead) and when my husband and I had our first child (paid for by my health insurance through my job), I decided to stay home with my child instead of returning to work. That made things tight, and for a short period of time, we registered for the help that was available to us, that's what it's there for!
Sure, I could have returned to work and put my child in daycare for 9 hours a day, but then I'd still have to listen to the likes of you condemning my choice and blaming all social ills on working mothers (we were inundated with that crap during the Reagan years remember). The conservative ideology is based on the idea that everyone should help themselves (usually to what doesn't belong to them) so spare me the "caring people" bit. If you are the type of “caring person” Bush was referring to, I'll take a caring government any day!
I have a good buddy who is big anti-tax guy. Often complains about the taxes he pays. He's a big Dino Rossi fan.
When him and now wife had an unexpected pregnancy, they decided to forgo marriage until after the state paid for all the medical cost of birthing and the first few months of life (she was only 22, he was 30).
They're doing great now, but when their daughter was born she had a lot of complications (thankfully, she's fine now) and had to be airlifted 3 times for 3 surgeries at Children's (they live in Skagit County).
His not-too-fantastic insurance offered by his employer would of made them owe ~30k in medical expenses. This would've killed them as they were just starting out and barley making ends meet.
People talk about personal responsibility, but there are instances where things happen out of your control (she was on birth control).
My buddy (besides his anti-tax leanings) is really not very conservative and yet he still holds his anti-tax sentiment (go figure, it most be upbringing).
But unlike my friend, the other anonymous is just plain angry and needs someone to blame. Funny how he isn't too vocal about the billions of dollars wasted on the Missile Defense Shield that may work 20yrs in the future.
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