If you think its butter, but it’s not…

The President has now made it clear that neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds…
oh wait. Neither massive category five hurricanes, nor outrageously expensive discretionary wars, nor massive deficits, nor anything else… will stop the inexorable flow of irresponsible tax cuts for the super-rich; certainly, the President has declared that it would be unthinkable if the 12-digit pork-barrel spending now envisioned for the Gulf (of Mexico… maybe we can call this “Gulf War III?”) were be funded by actual taxes.
Once in a while I’m reminded that there are, in fact, things about George W. Bush that I admire greatly. For one, I have to admire the size of the pair he carries around. Quoth the President: “We got to maintain economic growth, and therefore we should not raise taxes,” Mr. Bush said. Working people have already been subject, in effect, to a tax increase through higher gasoline costs, he said, “and we don’t need to be taking more money out of their pocket.” Man, you just can’t top a statement like that…
Anyway, I suppose I should follow the President’s own logic to its natural fallacy and point out that by it, if one pays for their gasoline with a credit card, why it’s not like their paying for it at all! So you see, Mr. President, since most Americans pay for everything on their credit cards, why, they really haven’t suffered a tax increase. Because we all know that if the government spends money (thereby siphoning goods and services out of the economy for its own ends) and choses to issue government bonds in lieu of actual cash for those goods and services, well… that doesn’t cost the taxpayers anything right?
I’m most impressed that there’s a new meme going around: aw shucks, goes the meme, George W. Bush has just had to deal with so much on his watch! Look at all these disasters he’s had to deal with! Again, one can’t top these things.
There really is something gone wrong in our national character. As a nation, we used to actually be winners. We admired winners. Pieces of shit losers, who might cut and run, blame easy target third world countries for our problems, crap in their pants and tear up our own constitution at the first sign of danger… were beneath our contempt. The smug rich boy pricks who thought they were better than the rest of us because they had no force of character because they were rich and hence never tested… were never considered “regular guys”: most people didn’t like them. We used to admire character– not bullshit “I call myself a Christian (that’s spelled with a K, btw) so you crackers know you can trust my crypto-racist bona fides” that we now call character (think “family values”); no, I’m talking… well, let me stick with Republicans. I guess I’m talking about… Ike? Or Gerald Ford? Or even Colin Powell? Men of decency… actual character… Perfect men? God no. But forget that.
Not anymore. Now we’re apparently just a nation of whining cringers, willing to cower in fear about anything, even to the point of fear of terrified people literally trying to flee for their lives… We used to be a better country than this.
For one thing, we used to pay for things we spent money on.