Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Political Crap
Did you see that strange story about Laura Bush in the papers the other day? She said she didn't believe any of the polls about her husband's popularity being so low. She mentioned that wherever she went people had nothing but good to say about the president. You don't suppose this is because whenever the president or his people go somewhere, the Secret Service makes sure there are no Bush naysayers around? Talk about the Emperor's clothes!
Other suitably stupid politics lately concerns a $100 windfall to offset the cost of gasoline! Now that's certainly going to turn my life around - I drive a VW Beetle and $100 would just about cover three fill-ups. Illegal aliens - oops, undocumented immigrants - are no problem and should be offered amnesty, however in the meantime, let's put 6,000 National Guard troops on the border - in between the time they spend getting shot and blown up in Iraq.
And while the government isn't data-mining or listening to your innocent phone calls, they have been tracking who, when and for how long you've been talking on the phone for the past five years. I've heard they haven't been tracking names - only phone numbers. That's comforting. It's not like anyone could figure who I was from my phone number!
And thank goodness that hydrogen fuel will take care of our energy needs when driving our 6,000 pound SUVs to and from the 7/11. I will admit I'm not too clear on where the hydrogen comes from. I know we can make it pretty cleanly using electricity - but I'm a little unclear on how we make the clean electricity. Oh well, I guess we can use hydrogen to generate clean electricity.
Oh yeah, and just to show that RHIP doesn't always apply, I've heard the National Guard - you know, the guys who will now be protecting our border in addition to Iraq - isn't allowing some officers to leave the military after their time of service is up. This is in addition to the Stop Loss program for the enlisted swine. I think, though can't be sure, that around 400 officers are involved in this at present. That means that you can now have non-volunteer officers leading non-volunteer enlisted troops in a war - which I'm sure makes for high motivation.
* For those not familiar with the terms, RHIP stands for Rank Has Its Privileges and Stop Loss is a program the military uses to keep folks from leaving the military until the military wants them too - regardless of when the folks should be leaving.
added later:
And from the how dumb do they take us to be section of the government:
"Finally, we hope that this video [a recently Pentagon released 9/11 video] will put to rest the conspiracy theories involving American Airlines Flight 77."
Now, I can't say before this that I put a great deal of faith in all the conspiracy theories about 9/11. I've always just taken it to be an exceptionally well-planned act of terror. However, if the government has had its hands on a chunk of video for five years, do they really expect us to buy the fact that it doesn't show exactly what they want it to show us? Let's face it, your 13 year old Nintendo playing nephew with a Macintosh and a couple free weekends can make a video clip that is going to show whatever he'd like it to show. Does the government really expect us to believe that after 5 years, it couldn't doctor up a video to show us what it wants?
