12/28/2004

To the Conscience of the Administration

Two from McSweeney's:

Letters to Entities Unlikely to Respond (for instance, women who pee all over toilet seats)

and

Create-Your-Own Thomas Friedman Column
.

We keed, we keed. In fact, Friedman's assessment of the Bush administration's priorities today was spot on. Cut America's contributions to global food aid programs, of course! Our terrible budget deficit requires cuts. But, spend $450 billion on our military this year, because those Iraqis, you know, they oil - I mean all - wanted to be free.

Now even the UN is calling us stingy. Well not exactly. What Jan Egeland, the UN's Emergency Relief Coordinator, actually said was "we were more generous when we were less rich, many of the rich countries. And it is beyond me why are we so stingy, really... Even Christmas time should remind many Western countries at least how rich we have become."

Egeland said he wasn't speaking of any one particular country. But it was too late; Colin Powell had already been trotted out to morning talk shows, his bosses' guilty consciences on his sleeve. Why jump to your own defense when you haven't been impugned? Because you're guilty as hell of stealing from the poor and padding the pockets of the rich, and you know it.

"We outmatch the contributions of other nations combined; we'll continue to do so," said Bush spokesman Trent Huffy. Whoops. Duffy.

Meanwhile, the death toll has climbed by more than a thousand as I blogged tonight. 56,000 and counting. And at least one-third of those, the children of Asia.

----------------------------------

George W. Bush has governed, for the most part, the way any airhead might, undermining the fiscal condition of the nation, squandering the goodwill of the world after Sept. 11, and allowing huge problems (global warming, entitlement spending, AIDS) to metastasize toward catastrophe through a combination of ideology, incomprehension, and indifference.

- Slate editor Jacob Weisberg


And any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that cripple the souls — the economic conditions that stagnate the soul, and the city governments that may damn the soul — is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood.

- Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, 1967


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