Redundant Headline Of The Moment

"Bush Puzzled By U.S. Re-Entry Plan"

Don't miss the next episode of the thrill-a-minute "Bush Puzzled" series: "Bush Puzzled By Alphabet", to be followed by "Pretzels Profoundly Puzzle Prez".

"When I first read that in the newspaper, about the need to have passports, for particularly the day-crossings that take place -- about a million, for example in the state of Texas -- I said, 'What's going on here?"' Bush told the American Society of Newspaper Editors. "I thought there was a better way to ... expedite the legal flow of traffic and people."

We already know he's lying, because he says he read it in a newspaper -- even though he's previously made claim that he doesn't read the newspaper. Obviously, his handlers are simply trying to wash his hands of the matter, owing to the backlash.

Also, notice that an abvious analog -- the legal flow of traffic and people through airports -- doesn't merit, in Bushbrain, expediting. Does he really think that the frontier is any less fraught than the skies? No -- but if it becomes a PR headache, he's sure to change his mind.

But if we were to take him at his word, then what, exactly, are we supposed to think about his Administration's competence?

A senior U.S. government official said State and Homeland Security officials had vetted the change exhaustively with the White House before announcing it April 5.

Okay, so the White House was fully aware of the plan. But the fucking President of the United States of America was at the time apparently on another of his every-other-weekly vacations back at the ranch; and prior to his signing of one of the major bills of his prize "Homeland Security" initiative was sufficiently ignorant of the contents of the bill that he'd put pen to that his later exposure to a decidedly not-minor provision of the bill elicited Presidential Befuddlement. Is that about right? Is that what the President means by, "Protecting the lives and the liberty of the American people."

In other News Of The Wise One:

...Bush said it is going to "take a while" to persuade Congress to restructure the federal retirement program. "This is a heavy lift for a lot of people in Congress," he said.

Why is it a "heavy lift"? Because the privatisation plan is highly unpopular -- and Congress is at least somewhat accountable to popular opinion. So, Bush's vision to "spread freedom" to the American masses via "liberation" of their retirement funds works something like this: lie, take a poll, lie, take a poll, lie, take a poll, lie take a poll, lie, take a poll, lie, take a poll. Then, after having determined that there're the population has been sufficiently hood-winked, commence "Operation: Social Even More Security".

Posted by Eddie Tews at April 15, 2005 09:17 PM