My lovely cousin, who incidentally lives in Alaska and knows a thing or two about the oil industry, sent me this pretend "Bush's Resignation!" speech this morning. I love my cousin dearly, but I could not allow it go past without a response. Yes, it's harsh, but I'm sick to death of blinded Bush supporters when it so clearly a failed administration.
The e-mail begins:
The following 'speech' was written recently by an ordinary Maine-iac [a resident of the People's Republic of Maine ]. While satirical in nature, all satire must have a basis in fact to be effective. This is an excellent piece by a person who does not write for a living. This resignation speech is what President George W. Bush SHOULD say...
The speech itself below, along with my (quite long) reply.
UPDATE
Exchanged a few e-mails with my cousin - the reply I received:
WOW! How do you really! feel!
My reply
Little Passionate about this election, yeah. Send me Bush/McCain supportive stuff and I'll reply all every time, hee hee.
Kiss! Love you!
and her response
Love ya back!!
XO,
I don't think she'll be including me on her Bush supporting e-mails any longer, lol. All's well that ends well, but I'm not taking any more.
The speech:
Normally, I start these things out by saying 'My Fellow Americans.' Not doing it this time. If the polls are any indication, I don't know who more than half of you are anymore. I do know something terrible has happened, and that you're really not fellow Americans any longer.
I'll cut right to the chase here: I quit. Now before anyone gets all in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, or to avoid prosecution or something, let me assure you: There's been no breaking of laws or impeachable offenses in this office.
The reason I'm quitting is simple. I'm fed up with you people. I'm fed up because you have no understanding of what's really going on in the world. Or of what's going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damned lazy to do your homework and figure it out.
Let's start local. You've been sold a bill of goods by politicians and the news media.
Meanwhile, all you can do is whine about gas prices, and most of you are too damn stupid to realize that gas prices are high because there's increased demand in other parts of the world, and because a small handful of noisy idiots are more worried about polar bears and beachfront property than your economic security.
We face real threats in the world. Don't give me this 'blood for oil' thing. If I were trading blood for oil I would've already seized Iraq's oil fields and let the rest of the country go to hell. And don't give me this 'Bush Lied...People Died' crap either. If I were the liar you morons take me for, I could've easily had chemical weapons planted in Iraq so they could be 'discovered.' Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty.
Let me remind you, too, that the rest of the world thought Saddam had the goods, same as me. Let me also remind you that regime change in Iraq was official US policy before I came into office. Some guy named ' Clinton ' established that policy. Bet you didn't know that, did you?
Now some of you morons want to be led by a junior senator with no understanding of foreign policy or economics, and this nitwit says we should attack Pakistan, a nuclear ally. And then he wants to go to Iran and make peace with a terrorist who says he's going to destroy us. While he's doing that, he wants to give Iraq to al Qaeda, Afghanistan to the Taliban, Israel to the Palestinians, and your money to the IRS so the government can give welfare to illegal aliens, who he will make into citizens, so they can vote to re-elect him. He also thinks we just need to sit down and talk to Iran and things would be better (what the hell do you think we've been doing behind the scenes), and we should stop our foreign aid to Israel . Did you sleep through high school or what?
You idiots need to understand that we face a unique enemy. Back during the cold war, there were two major competing political and economic models squaring off. We won that war, but we did so because fundamentally, the Communists wanted to survive, just as we do. We were simply able to outspend and out-tech them.
That's not the case this time. The soldiers of our new enemy don't care if they survive. In fact, they want to die. That'd be fine, as long as they weren't also committed to taking as many of you with them as they can. But they are. They want to kill you and the bastards are all over the globe.
You should be grateful that they haven't gotten any more of us here in the United States since September 11. But you're not. That's because you've got no idea how ha rd a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that. When this whole mess started, I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight. I'm disappointed how many of you people think a long and difficult fight amounts to a single season of 'Survivor.'
Instead, you've grown impatient. You're incapable of seeing things through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do. You think that wars should last a few months, a few years, tops.
Making matters worse, you actively support those who help the enemy. Every time you buy the New York Times, every time you send a donation to a cut-and-run Democrat's political campaign, well, dang it, you might just as well Fed Ex a grenade launcher to a Jihadist. It amounts to the same thing. (I'll add the ACLU, AARP and Planned Parenthood to that list!)
In this day and age, it's easy enough to find the truth. It's all over the Internet. It just isn't on the pages of the New York Times, USA Today, or on NBC News. But even if it were, I doubt you'd be any smarter. Most of you are more concerned with the price of oil than the price of a pre-born baby's life.
I could say more about your expectations that the government will always be there to bail you out, even if you're too stupid to leave a city that's below sea level and has a hurricane approaching.
I could say more about your insane belief that government, not your own wallet, is where the money comes from. But I've come to the conclusion that were I to do so, it would sail right over your heads.
Speaking of money, last week I tried to get Congress to go along with a plan to get liquidity restored in the credit markets, but after the media and some of the idiot politicians here in Washington, who are more worried about getting re-elected, started calling it a "Wall Street bailout plan", the Congress had to respond to the citizen polls and so they rejected our recommendation. So, now I am going to retire at full pay, courtesy of the U.S. government, and the rest of you can start worrying about how you are going to survive a depression and also start planning how you are going to make it on your worthless stock investments when you are ready to retire.
So, bottom line is that "I QUIT"! I'm going back to Crawford. I've got an energy-efficient house down there (Al Gore could only dream) and the capability to be fully self-sufficient for all of the years of my retirement. No one ever heard of Crawford, TX before I got elected and as soon as I'm done here pretty much no one will ever hear of it again. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to die of old age before the last pillars of America fall.
Oh, and by the way, Cheney's quitting too. That means Pelosi is your new
President. You asked for it. Watch what she does carefully, because I still have a glimmer of hope that there are just enough of you remaining who are smart enough to turn this thing around in the remaining months of 2008.
So that's it. God bless what's left of America .
Some of you know what I mean. The rest of you, kiss off.
Good night!!
George W. Bush
PS - You might want to start learning Farsi, too, and buy a Koran. Obama
already has his copy. Also, all of you Hollywood types and you degenerates in the world had better develop an "exit plan" because you will be the first to die when the terrorists take over.
Isn't that lovely? I could not take it, I've had enough. Here is my response:
And the Progressive Response:
Mr. Bush,
Unlike you and your party the majority of the people in this country understand that we are all Americans, regardless of political party affiliation. When you refused to refer to the vast majority of the people in the country who know you to be the all-time worst president in the history of this country as "fellow Americans" you made it quite clear that your allegiance lies elsewhere. It's not that you don't know 71% of us (link), it's that you've run the most corrupt, secretive, and politically motivated administration in history. You say the majority of the citizens of this country are no longer Americans. I say you're the problem, not the citizens of this great nation. But even though you deserve to be locked up at the Hague for war crimes and impeached for the corruption you sowed throughout the Executive branch, I would never say you were not an American. You're a citizen by birth and there's nothing anyone can do to change that.
The reason you're so unpopular is because we really do understand what's going on in the world. We have seen the lawbreaking you deny, the impeachable offenses that you insist are not there. The only reason you haven't been run out on a rail and sent to the Hague is because of our spineless congress is afraid of the constitutional crisis that will result from pursuing the charges. Most of the congress is in this with you. The lock-step, unthinking Republicans for sure, but the so-called "Blue Dog Democrats" as well. It's just been easier to try to contain your madness for a few more months than it would be to impeach your sorry ass.
Oh, don't worry about us, we're working very hard to get rid of all those sorry representatives. We don't like Nancy "impeachment is off the table" Pelosi any more than you do. We'll take her over any one of your moronic Republicans, that's for sure, but we're going to challenge her in the next democratic primary and try to replace her with a real Progressive with a spine in 2010. We're going to have full control of the Senate and the House in January and with Obama and Biden in charge of the executive branch, we're finally going to have grown-ups running the country. And it looks like it's going to be just in the nick of time.
You bet we're concerned about Polar Bears. As the stewards of this planet, it's our responsibility to protect the unique diversity of life we see all around us. We don't care if your oil company buddies aren't able to drill in ANWR, there's hardly enough oil there to make a difference and it's years away from production anyway. We're going to invest in alternative sources of energy and get this country, and the world, off of fossil fuels and into clean, green, sustainable energy. We're going to start conserving energy and those conservation efforts are going to be driven by real leadership in the White House in the form of Barack Obama. And that effort is going to create the economic security you keep referring to, but which you have squandered in an unnecessary war and tax breaks for the rich. Of course, you wouldn't know the first thing about actual leadership so you strike out at what you don't understand. So you just get the hell out of here and let the rest of us fix the mess you and your cronies have left behind.
Are you seriously saying that the best defense you have for your disastrous unprovoked invasion of Iraq with falsified intelligence is that you could have planted chemical weapons there yourself, but didn't? That's the best you can do? That sir, indicates the true weakness of your argument but you probably don't even recognize that. I'm sure you thought about it, but you know that we'd bust your ass when we found out. You probably had real men in the military tell you that they wouldn't do it, as well.
Of COURSE regime change in Iraq was a good idea, the rest of us just wanted to do it without spilling American blood. Besides, it was Dick Cheney and the Republicans who put Saddam Hussein in power in the first place (but he probably never told you that). Unlike you and your Republican enablers, Democrats actually care about our military men and women and keep them out of harm's way unless they're absolutely necessary. The war in Afghanistan was justified, but you screwed that up by pouncing on Iraq which not only turned the tide in Afghanistan by removing needed troops but resulted in 4,000+ additional soldiers killed in that unnecessary invasion.
And for what? We're not any safer now than we were before you invaded. In fact we're less safe because now that there is chaos in Iraq, Al-Queda and other Muslim extremists have moved in to fill the void and now they have a whole country to base their operations. Now our military is stretched thin fighting two wars, making us less safe. Saddam Hussein was contained and we weren't spilling our blood and demolishing our treasury to keep him contained. He needed to be removed, that is for sure, but not at this cost.
SIGH
Ok, Mr. President, you really sound like an idiot when you start talking about Senator Obama like you did in this speech. He knows more about foreign policy than any other presidential candidate in history, and he's got smart people surrounding him like Joe Biden who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He will appoint smart people to key positions, like Warren Buffett for Treasury Secretary. He'll appoint smart people who know what they're doing, not idiot partisian hacks like Michael "Brownie" Brown who knew nothing about disaster preparedness, and certainly not criminals from the watergate era like you've surrounded yourself with. Appointments will also be out in the open too, not shuffled through in the cover of recess appointments like you have done many times, so you can get crazy religious extremists and your financial supporters their cushy government appointments.
Also, Senator Obama was quite clear in the last presidential debate (you probably didn't pay attention) that he never intends to invade Pakistan unless they refuse to take care of al Qaeda. Now, you call their dictator a nuclear ally, but providing protection to our number one enemy doesn't sound like much of an ally to me. And your ridiculous, stupid really, remarks about giving Iraq to al Qaeda, Afghanistan to the Taliban and all the other nonsense.. you know, we all know you don't really believe that so when you say it out loud like that it just shows how much of an unthinking partisan "party before country" jerk you really are. 71% of us just roll our eyes at your remarks.
We're all quite aware of what a threat some religious extremists can be, but see, the rest of us are smart enough to know that we don't need to throw away our civil liberties for a little bit of security. Those of us in the majority in the country understand that our civil rights and our constitution are precious and should never be trampled on. We're not peeing our pants like Republicans do at the thought of some religious idiot with a bomb strapped to his chest. Your scare mongering really works well with your simple minded Republican supporters, but it doesn't faze those of us living in reality one bit. In fact, we're more scared of your right wing anti-government supporters, the "domestic terrorists," then we are of some idiot living in a cave on the other side of the planet. Truly dangerous people like the founder of the Alaska Independence Party, who Sarah Palin supports, who was killed in an illegal explosives deal gone bad. Those people are our biggest threat.
Yes, we will sit down and talk to Iran. This "what the hell do you think we've been doing behind the scenes" bullshit is absolute bullshit (link). Anyone who would write that down is the moron who has not been paying attention. You yourself stated that we are not speaking with Iran, and as soon as your administration stopped engaging with Iran, they immediately acquired hundreds of centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Diplomacy doesn't necessarily work all the time, but it's much, much preferable to risking more of our national blood and treasure in a war and should be used until the very end. You're a liar, Mr. Bush.. or whoever wrote your speech today is a complete and total idiot.
We want to stop our troops from being killed by having them posted right in the middle of a civil war. You don't "win" a war against civilians unless you're prepared to occupy the country for generations. You didn't have the first clue about what would happen after the first few weeks of the invasion of Iraq, and when your generals and advisers explained to you that invading Iraq would take hundreds of thousands of troops... you fired them Mr. President. That's despicable and everything that has happened in Iraq was predicted well before the invasion. You just choose not to listen. President Obama will listen to the people he surrounds himself with and he will make considered, adult judgments based on the facts.
Oh, and there you go again with your elementary school name-calling. See, 71% of us know that the New York Times is just a newspaper. They're not supporting religious extremists, in fact, their reporters have been on your payroll and have posted stories practically written by your administration. They even withheld important information about the war (and who knows what else) until after the 2004 election... information that was detrimental to your administration, allowing you to squeak through another election. Now, that doesn't mean they're in the tank for you, it just demonstrates that they're simply a newspaper and calling them supporters of "jihadist" is simply ridiculous. It's the same for the Democratic party, the wonderful ACLU and the fabulous planned parenthood. Again, we all know that you don't really believe those groups are anti-American, so when you say things like this it just makes you and your supporters look like complete and total idiots. It indicates that you and your supporters will LIE, CHEAT, and STEAL in the name of winning at all costs. It's always party before country with you guys.
Thankfully, you and your supporters have been kicked to the curb and are about to be completely destroyed in next month's election. The Republican party has already been reduced to a regional party and after this election it will become crystal clear that the Republican brand is worthless. People that are still supporting Republicans after this election will be chastised and ridiculed for generations. They'll be blamed for the failings of "trickle down" economics that didn't work with Reagan, obviously didn't work with Bush II, and would result in the financial ruin of this country if McCain were to be elected.
When you say that people were too stupid to leave a city below sea level, it indicates just how heartless and cruel you are. Frankly, it explains a lot of your behavior and the recent behavior of Republicans at McCain/Palin rallies. You're all a bunch of racist, uncaring, unthinking, religious extremists yourselves. The projection you and your supporters demonstrate every single day is blatantly obvious to those of us not blinded by partisanship or lobotomized by extremist religious beliefs. Shouts of "kill him!" and "terrorist!" during those rallies are frightening to the thinking majority of this country, but we don't need to explain that because it will be demonstrated without a doubt come November 4th when your party is thrown out of government and relegated to the dustbin of history.
See, there are poor people in New Orleans. I know it may come as a shock to you, but there are people without cars, who sometimes don't even know where their next meal is coming from. These people not only had no means of leaving the city and nowhere to go, they were also promised by their government that they would be provided for during the disaster. The problem wasn't that these people were "too stupid" to leave, it's because they could not leave and were told that they would be cared for. It was the failure of your FEMA agency, headed by "heckuva job Brownie," that resulted in those people's pain. I know the upcoming Obama administration will not make serious mistakes like that.
We don't believe that government should always bail people out, but your Administration sure seems to come up with huge money when corporate America screws up. Your administration can't spend $10 billion on health care for children, our most vulnerable citizens, but can come up with $810 Billion to bail out corporate America when it leverages itself with derivatives worth more than the world GDP and fail because of their extreme greed. These companies are so big and with their tentacles spread throughout our entire economy that they are simply too big to fail. They got that way because of the Republican desire to remove all banking and financial regulations, regulations that were put in place after the Great Depression for this exact, very reason. These regulations have been whittled away by John McCain, Phil Gramm, and the rest of the lock-step Republican party for years and now we're all suffering the consequences of their greed (KeatingEconomics.com). The upcoming Obama administration will correct that.
And your comment that you could actually put words together that would "sail over our heads" is just too stupid to be believed. We would love it, our heads would explode, but we beg you, we plead with you, just once.. say something smart. Say something none of us understand. You haven't done it in 8 years and you will forever be known as the "idiot president," but with one intelligent speech you might could salvage that labeling. Even a speech about the role of government versus my wallet would be absolutely stellar. We would love to hear you give us that speech that we don't understand, but I think it's quite clear that you aren't capable of stringing together a complete sentence, much less an entire speech that makes any sense at all.
So yes, get the hell out of Washington, Mr. President. The only smart thing you've ever done your entire life was build that green house on your ranch in Crawford. I just wish you would have followed through with more support for renewable energy for our country while you and your party had control of our entire government for 6 years. If you had done that, your legacy would have been much different. We wouldn't care what happens in the Middle East and we'd just let the Shia and the Sunni blow themselves up while we provide our own clean sources of energy right here in the USA. But as it is, you're getting out of town right in front of the angry mob that's ready to tar and feather you and your puppeteer, Mr. Cheney, so you better get while the gettin's good.
Your legacy will be one of failure. Abject, utter failure, the worst president in the history of this country and we blame you and your idiot supporters for the mess we're in right now. Thankfully, your failure has given rise to what will be an historic Obama administration. The upcoming Obama administration will fight hard and pull this country back up on its feet and put the grown-ups back in charge. The contrast will be stark when compared to your corrupt and worthless 8 years. History books will forever report the failure of the Bush Administration and how miraculous it was when the Obama administration pulled everything back together against all odds.
My only fear is that one of your stupid, racist, idiot supporters may decide that they can't stand to see an Obama administration and will do something horrific. Yes, your party, your leadership, and your supporters are all a bunch of closed-minded, unintelligent, religious extremists that refuse to see any facts that don't correspond to their own world view and just like an abortion doctor assassin, may be deluded enough to think they're justified to do something terrible.
That's right, I'm more fearful of your supporters than I am of any Muslim extremist in the middle east. I'm terrified by anyone who would think to send your speech out and think for one moment that it has a lick of truth to it. People whom I respect, who I love, but people who I cannot sit idly by and let them get away with this kind of thinking without a response. The Republican party had it's chance and had complete and total control of our government for 6 of the last 8 years. They have had control of every branch of government and look where it's taken us. The Republican party puts itself before our country, it's undeniable. And it still has the gall to exclaim that they are the party of "God Bless America!"
Well, we'll show you exactly what it means to love this country as the vast majority of us roll up our sleeves and get to work. It's going to be hard correcting the massive failures of the last 8 years, but we're going to do it. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.
Fuck you, Mr. President.
Harsh? Indeed. How would you have responded?