My belated response to the State of the Union.

[GOPBasher]

This is my belated response to the State of the Union speech. I’ve been working seven day weeks, sometimes twelve hours. So, I’m going to go ahead and forgive myself for my lateness. :-)

This is from my blog (http://openletterstopresidentbush.blogspot.com/), where I write about president Bush in second-person point-of-view, basically an open letter to him.

Dear President Bush,

Nice final State of the Union speech. I think this speech nicely highlights how completely and utterly out of touch you are with what is happening in our country. First, let’s look at domestic issues.

You hardly mentioned the health care crisis. You said: “We share a common goal: making health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans.” First of all, do you really share that goal, because you’ve done absolutely nothing over the past seven years to hold down health care costs. They have been soaring, far outpacing inflation.

We have 47 million uninsured; we have millions more underinsured. And the costs of our health care system are hurting businesses and even fully-insured middle class families who are having trouble even keeping up with co-pays and deductibles.

You’re next statement: “The best way to achieve that goal is by expanding consumer choice, not government control.” Really? We already have a privatized system, and that is exactly what is sending costs through the roof. We have to pay for profits all along the system, and we have to pay for ridiculous marketing campaigns from pharmaceutical companies, and we have to pay for incredibly complex billing processes from insurance companies, etc.

Let me make an example out of that country you hate: France. They spend far less on health care as a percentage of their GDP, only about 9% to our roughly 16%. Yet, they cover everyone, and we only cover 6/7 of our population. And the quality is at least just as good. They’re better in every measurable statistic, from the child mortality rate to life expectancy. This is precisely because they have a very simple government-based system. Everyone pays, everyone benefits, case closed. They don’t waste money on ridiculously complex billing process, or idiotic drug commercials, or unnecessary profits. Right, I know, France, like totally sucks, because they like totally didn’t help us jump Iraq after school.

You mentioned, as one method of holding down health care costs, limiting lawsuits. Perhaps alcohol permanently impaired your memory. You already did that, liming lawsuits to no more than $250,000 and, just as we all said, that did not even come close to helping bring down health care costs.

You also talked about taxing and spending. You want to make your tax cuts permanent. Let me ask you a question, when the hell in the history of this country have we cut taxes in time of war? It’s your tax cuts in the midst of fighting two wars that are responsible for adding three trillion dollars to the national debt in your time in office, the vast majority of which was with a Republican Congress. That debt has accumulated despite starving domestic programs.

Oh, but you said you’re cutting $18 billion of “wasteful spending.” Wow! That totally helps after we spend that much in about nine weeks in Iraq.

And as for the domestic economy, you said, “wages are up, but so are food and gas.” This is an interesting way of putting it. Wages have not been keeping up with inflation throughout your term, which means that real wages are decreasing. The real cost of living, furthermore, is increasing even faster than the official inflation rate. Food and energy (especially oil/gasoline), which are necessities, are not only increasing, as you said, but increasing much faster than the CPI.

And you said, “Our security, our prosperity and our environment all require reducing our dependence on oil.” You think? You know, some of us were saying this before it was cool. Then you flaunted the bill that will increase efficiency standards to 35 mpg by 2020. The following criticism is aimed not only at you, but also the Democratic Congress. This bill does not do nearly enough, as global peak oil production, if it hasn’t already passed, is coming soon. This is one of the most serious economic challenges we’ve ever faced, as oil prices will continue to sky-rocket as they have been. On top of that, more and more of the oil that is produced will come from overseas, further hurting the economy in the form of higher trade deficits and a weaker dollar. Plus, more and more of our oil imports will come from despots we don’t like, because that’s where the oil is. (It’s like someone upstairs is trying to tell us something.) That’ll cause major national security issues. Drilling for oil causes ecological problems that threaten our sustainability. And of course, we have those pesky greenhouse gases, the emissions of which will continue to accelerate, while you wait, arms-folded, for China and India to act first.

And the new energy act also called for more corn-based ethanol. This is joke of historic proportions. It takes roughly the same amount of energy to raise the crops as we get in return. There is very little, if any, net energy. (The ratio of energy we get out to energy we put in is approximately 11 to 10). Plus, when looking for a silver-bullet, we generally don’t want something that competes directly with food, which will strangle supply and raise the costs of both food and fuel. But, of course, farmers have a lobby, so let the money talk! Onward with corn-based ethanol!

Cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels (biodiesal, methanol, butanol, etc) show far more promise. And they have many sources that don’t compete with food; for example, biodiesel can be made from algae or switchgrass that grows on land unsuitable for growing food crops. None of those has a big lobby, however.

On foreign policy, you stated again that we are always on the side of democracy and freedom. So, why do we still support the regime in Saudi Arabia? Oh yeah, they have oil. You talked about success in Afghanistan, but didn’t mention that since we took our eye off the ball there, concentrating our resources in Iraq, the Taliban has made a resurgence. On Iraq, you again tried confusing American by talking about Al Qaeda in Iraq as if that’s the reason we went in. One more time, for the benefit of morons so fucking braindead that they actually still believe you: Al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the fall of Saddam; they’re in there now. In fact, Saddam and Osama Bin Laden were enemies, because Saddam was far too secular for Bin Laden’s taste. Once again, Saddam was secular and hated the theocrats. They were enemies, not friends. We helped Al Qaeda by overthrowing Saddam. You see they’re both evil, and the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend. Sometimes, they’re both our enemies. You Republicans can’t seem to get that through your head.

And you continued beating the drums of war on Iran. Awesome! Let’s have more dead and wounded troops, more dead and wounded innocent civilians, more hundreds of billions of dollars on our national platinum card, further damage to our nation’s image in the eyes of the global community. And, don’t forget to ask nothing from the rest of us!

That’s our Bush: “War for the soldiers, tax cuts for the rest of us!” What a pig of a president.

[GOPBasher]

1. Shameless self-kick, cause I just got it in my journal. :-)