02 July 2006
Forrest Bush
In a NY Times OP-ED piece on May 17, 2006, entitled, "Saying No To Bush's Yes Men," Thomas Friedman asked the question: "How could there still be 29 percent of the people who approve of this presidency?"
Good question. I'm not here to answer it, but to pose an alternative question: "How could any intelligent person truly hate George W. Bush?"
That is not to say I approve of his policies--any of them--the man, his character or apparent lack thereof, his philosophy of government, or his attempt to fill the role of president as a D-list understudy. To be sure, only two of the promises made in his 2000 and 2004 election campaigns have come to pass. If not for the War of Terrorism, today Dubyah would be a virtual nobody.
His cronies crassly claim classist tax cuts are responsible for a "strong" economy that is, in reality, propped upon the shoulders of the soldiers occupying Iraq, and the grossly negligent, deficit spending that lines the pockets of military contractors, Wall Street insiders, and other friends of the Halliburton and the Carlisle Group.
The Prescription Drug Act, a.k.a. Medicare Part D, has spiraled the Federal healthcare bureaucracy beyond Hillary Clinton's wildest dreams, provided greater opportunity for mismanagement and fraud than parts A, B, and C combined, and confused the hell out of the intended recipients and their local pharmacists. At the same time it has made pharmaceutical manufacturers richer and more powerful than they have been since before there was any regulation over the industry at all--over 100 years ago--when Cocaine and Marihuana were the primary ingredients in over half of the patent medicines available in this country, and could be purchased out of a Sears Roebuck mail order catalog.
Despite two false promises and a litany (too long to enumerate here) of bumbling failures, mistakes, screwups, illegal abuses of power, bald-faced lies, incompetence of unqualified cronies who are textbook testimony from the Peter Principle, and an inner sanctum of Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and Rice--whom I affectionately term: the Four Horse Apples of the Apocalypse--I don't hate the man.
To say one hates George W. Bush is equivalent to saying one hates Rainman or Forrest Gump. I don't like him, and I don't think he knows who's on first; but he is an excellent driver and he loves his Momma.
Momma always said: "Life is like a barrel of apples. A body can be sour or be a sweet one. Dubyah, you have to choose whether you are gonna be de vinegar or decider."
JR Ford
UP (Unsubstantiated Press)
St. Petersburg, Fl.
sixtimeseven@aol.com
forty-two
31 May 2006
"Verily I say unto you, to criticize George W. Bush is proverbially: ‘Whipping a dead horse's ass.’" -- JR Ford, Dec 2005.
