In his radio address this week, the Pretzelnit, according to the headline on the AP wire story, [ripped] Democratic lawmakers' failures. Those remarks immediately rocketed to the top of the "Unintentional Irony" list, beating out previous contenders for the top honors as Mission Accomplished, the "Coalition of the Willing," and the famous promise, in the runup to the Iraq war, that our troops would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people with candy and flowers, and that the war would only cost a couple of billion dollars.
With the cots of the Iraq war spiraling ever upward (have we reached $2 billion a day yet?), with 3,500 flag-draped coffins already transported back to the United States and still counting, with an ever-growing list of controversies and scandals plaguing his administration, and with his approval ratings plunging dangerously close to Tricky Dicky territory, Mr. Bush is hardly in a position to cast aspersions about failures. In fact, I'd argue that being called a miserable failure by this president is in fact a compliment, given that if there's anyone in the U.S. government who understands what failure looks like, it's Mr. Bush. Of course, the problem there is that he doesn't actually understand what failure looks like, since he's convinced that he's doing everything exactly right and it's everybody around him that's wrong.
I found it particularly ironic that one of the congressional failures Bush mentioned in his speech was the immigration bill, given that if he's trying to paint the Democrats as failures at leadership and getting legislation passed, it's a little odd to do so using an example where the failure was entirely the fault of the Republican caucus, many of whose members refused to have anything to do with the pretzelnit's bill, on the grounds that their racist and xenophobic base wouldn't like it. Another howler was the return to the traditional Republican meme of the Democrats as the party of "tax-and-spend." The problem there, of course, is that the Hedgemony has yet to meet a spending bill it didn't like, and has continued to cut taxes even as federal spending increases exponentially. Given a choice between tax-and-spend and borrow-and-spend policies, I think most voters, as evidenced by the results of the 2006 midterm elections among other indicators, are far more comfortable with he former than the latter, as at least under the former there's a chance that we won't have to mortgage our national monuments to pay the interest on the loans made to us by the Chinese.
All in all, the pretzelnit's address was an obvious attempt to distract from his plunging approval ratings and his utter inability to get anything done during the waning days of his failed presidency. And as usual, he mucked it up.
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