The president’s smooth Tuesday night attempt at pushing more disingenuous policy rhetoric on the masses left some of us longing to clarify exactly what the president plans for our county.
Except for Bush’s initiative, the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, that will, almost, be effective at combating the AIDS crisis in Africa, the presidential drivel that poured forth was as believable as flowers are comforting at a wake.
The president is depending on Americans unquestionably believing that all his programs are just as good as he made them sound Tuesday night. For instance, the President proudly boasted about his creation of “America’s great protector,” the Department of Homeland Security–when we all know the new department’s only success has been to deny thousands of its workers the right to unionize and demand a living wage.
Despite what he said last Tuesday night, the “Clear Skies” program is not an effort on the president’s part to clean up the environment. In reality, the program will allow power plants to emit more pollution, for a decade longer, than the current Clean Air Act allows.
His nearly seven hundred billion dollar tax break to the richest five percent may lead to some money trickling down to the working class, but only in the form of jobs in the growing service and retail industries that do not pay enough for an individual to support a family.
The president’s assertion that privatizing the Health Care system can solve all of our problems calls to mind the failure of for-profit nursing homes. There are many reports of hungry, neglected patients with bedsores due to the nursing home company’s cost-cutting in the form of deliberate under-staffing. Ultimately, for-profit companies cannot put a patient’s health care before profits.
Also, President Bush’s plan to solve the problem of doctors getting “unfairly” sued will not be as productive and rewarding to society as the president makes it sound. His plan won’t lessen the load of these overworked and fatigued doctors; it will only lessen the amount for which a victim can be compensated.
Finally, North Korea is not getting enough of the president’s attention. We know for a fact that the North Koreans are currently building nuclear weapons, but the president barely acknowledges the threat coming from this particular member of the Axis of Evil. Hussein, on the other hand, might have weapons of mass destruction–not that the president can prove it–yet there’s a mass buildup of U.S. troops on the borders of Iraq. The fact is, we supported Hussein when he was executing elected members of his government during parliament sessions and committing countless other atrocities during the Iraq/Iran conflict. Clearly, the U.S. government is not genuinely concerned with peoples’ lives in other countries and, therefore, altruism is not the source of our current aggression. But most of all, if President Bush is willing to cloak the destructive nature of almost all of the programs he introduced in his second State of the Union Address, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the war on Iraq is not being waged on the same foundation of deceit and destruction.