This is diet?

After years and years of telling us we can have everything (and free pie too), i.e., tax cuts for the super-rich, drugs for Granny, a strong and overpriced defense, homeland security, a huge discretionary war, big new education spending (no child left behind), and now, a coupla hundred billion to give away to friends and GOP contributors at Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, et al. pay for Hurricane Katrina recovery and rebuild the Gulf States… finally, the President has called for some level of national sacrifice. “Don’t drive, “ sayeth the President. Unless you really have to, of course. None of those discretionary trips, you know, like, just taking the car out for a few hours just for, like, the hell of it, because at $3.50 a gallon for gasoline, well… I mean… why wouldn’t you? But please don’t. It’s now your patriotic duty to drive less.
What is this? The President of the United States is suggesting that Americans conserve energy? What the hell is next? He’s going to tell us to eat our vegetables? I mean, this namby, pamby whining and moralizing , coming along with the massive new government spending program which might inadvertently benefit Black people (albeit as an accident)… I mean, is this guy a Republican at all? I mean, as Dick Cheney has told us, it is our God given duty as Americans to squander as much of the Earth’s wealth as fast as humanly possible (and preferably on borrowed money).
Has the President gone soft on us? What gives?
I mean– his people are certainly holding up– good old former (and now disgraced) FEMA Director Mike “Brownie” Brown blasted every single Democrat in sight as the cause of the catastrophic failure of governmental response to Hurricane Katrina in his Capitol Hill testimony (which also revealed that Mike is still on FEMA’s payroll as a consultant!)
I mean, come on Mr. President: the team is holding together, from Brownie to the downward-delegating “no one above the rank of sergeant is responsible for anything” army that convicted ex-Pfc. Lynndie England of various Abu Ghraib related counts… GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado proposes selling off parts of the national park system to pay for Katrina relief… GOP Senators Sessions and Kyl were searching for a rich corpse to justify the estate tax repeal, even in the face of Katrina’s devastation and the need for a sound public fisc to repair it…
The team is playing like a well-oiled machine (pun intended)! This is no time to be giving up, Mr. President with nonsense that a little bad weather should make Americans alter our God-ordained lifestyle even a little.
Pull yourself together, man. Maybe a few weeks of brush-clearing might clear your mind…