There’s always something good to say about the Little Picture — toddler grandson using words like “amazing” and “pulchritudinous” in the correct context (love those Nick Jr. programs). My mom, for a few moments, forgettng who I am and then remembering that she forgot and laughing about it.
But the Big Picture continues to get more and more dismal. Others are chronicling in detail the insanity, the deceit, the immorality of the Bush administration, so I don’t have to try to do it here, except to link you to:
Molly Ivins, who carefully points out the outright lies the Bushies are spreading about the Iraq elections, the future of Social Security, the supposed increase in employment, and the health threat of perchlorate, a toxic rocket fuel ingredient, in the water etc. etc.
And she adds
Now, in addition to the regular misleading, fudging, distorting and phony statistics games, we’re getting actual covert propaganda, and dammittohell, they’re making us pay for it. A quarter of a million bucks to a right-wing commentator to talk up No Child Left Behind. Why? Distributing video “news” releases to television stations made and paid for by the government, but not identified as such. It’s not enough that Bush has the bulliest pulpit on earth, he has to sneak his message across with government propaganda? What the hell is this?
Then there’s Thom Hartmann’s historically accurate reminder that the Bushies effort to appoint Gonzales
is one of the more visible parts of a much larger campaign the Bush administration has embarked on to reverse not only 229 years of the American rule of law regarding the rights of average citizens, but nearly eight centuries of human rights that go back to an epic moment in 1215 on a meadow by the River Thames.
Proving the outright Bushy lies regarding the plan to privatize Social Security, Paul Krugman points out:
It’s the standard Bush administration tactic: invent a fake crisis to bully people into doing what you want. “For the first time in six decades,” the memo says, “the Social Security battle is one we can win.” One thing I haven’t seen pointed out, however, is the extent to which the White House expects the public and the media to believe two contradictory things.
The administration expects us to believe that drastic change is needed, and needed right away, because of the looming cost of paying for the baby boomers’ retirement.
The administration expects us not to notice, however, that the supposed solution would do nothing to reduce that cost. Even with the most favorable assumptions, the benefits of privatization wouldn’t kick in until most of the baby boomers were long gone. For the next 45 years, privatization would cost much more money than it saved.
Advocates of privatization almost always pretend that all we have to do is borrow a bit of money up front, and then the system will become self-sustaining. The Wehner memo talks of borrowing $1 trillion to $2 trillion “to cover transition costs.” Similar numbers have been widely reported in the news media.
But that’s just the borrowing over the next decade. Privatization would cost an additional $3 trillion in its second decade, $5 trillion in the decade after that and another $5 trillion in the decade after that. By the time privatization started to save money, if it ever did, the federal government would have run up around $15 trillion in extra debt.
Add to all of that the evidence coming out during the trials of the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. Stacking naked prisoners up like cheerleaders. Oh yeah! Great American sports tradition.
And, more car bombs as the people Bush tried to tell us he was liberating continue to let us know that they hate us more than they hated Saddam. Way to go, Georgie.
It would be great if I could retreat somewhere into the little picture and take refuge. But I can’t even do that. As I sat here writing this, my mom walked in three times to complain that her sixty-year old sewing machine still isn’t working, even though we had it repaired and tuned up last month. Three times I went over to her apartment and re-set what she set up incorrectly. It’s not the sixty-year old machine that’s not working. It’s her almost-89 year old brain. And it would make my life so much more simple if she would just admit it and not keep insisting it’s everyone’s fault but her own.
Hey, you offspring of mine. If I get like that, shoot me. Or, like the Eskimos supposedly used to do, leave me outside in the freezing cold and let me quiety slip into eternal and peacegiving hypothermic sleep.
Hmm. Any chance someone can lock Dumbya out of the White House during some upcoming blizzard?