Presidential Propaganda

In Chicago today, President Bush gave the same speech he’s given for the last five years, hoping to shift public sentiment about his Staying The Course of Failure policy in Iraq.

The central rationale for staying in Iraq, according to the President, is to keep the terrorists from pushing us out and using Iraq as a base for training and staging more terrorist acts.

But the President and his incompetent advisors fail to grasp that the terrorists want us to stay in Iraq because our occupation bolsters their central claim that we are trying to control the region’s oil reserves. This claim has been responsible for recruiting more suicide bombers than all other rationales combined.

The best thing we could do would be to withdraw completely, including closing our newly built mega-bases, thus removing the centerpiece of the terrorist grievance against us. Iraq will ultimately flush the foreign fighters from its midst.

Will Iraq keep itself from civil war? It’s already engaged in a civil war, and our troop strength and policy set is inadequate to stop it. So our presence there is no longer serving a purpose. It is, in fact, playing into the hands of terrorists.

The President also said that we have made progress in moving toward energy independence, calling it a "full blown strategy." Is he making some kind of grotesque joke? Apparently, he feels that mentioning something in a state of the union address means that the problem is solved.

Additional refinery capacity won't wean us from our addiction to oil, nor will throwing a few million dollars at new battery technology. Bush has still done nothing about mileage standards, nor put into place any large scale or comprehensive program to develop a revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary) approach. His propaganda on this issue is shameful.

Bush finally declared, "You win elections by believing something. You win elections by having a policy that actually accomplishes something." But he didn't explain how a President wins by believing something that is false, wrongheaded, superstitous, dysfunctional or downright abhorrent.

Bush believes in torture, deception, unfettered wiretapping, government secrecy, preemptive war, selective leaking, corporate greed, helping the wealthy, no accountability, mixing religion with government and unchecked Presidential power.

By any reckoning, his administration has accomplished nothing positive (unless, of course, you are extremely wealthy). Our jobless recovery is built on a horrifying mountain of debt. Our prescription drug policy is a wasteful, deceptive sham. Our No Child Left Behind policy has been a disaster.

No amount of speechifying can overcome these failures. Indeed, every time Bush opens his mouth, he confirms what most Americans have concluded. That he is a failed President incapable of changing course.