Oh, To Live On Planet Bush

I hope the next time Americans elect a president they try to get one from planet Earth. Those that come from beyond, places like planet Bush, don't do too well down here. Maybe it's the whole gravity thing. They get weighted down and sluggish and their minds turn really dull. They can't seem to get a sentence out right. Maybe it's too much oxygen in the atmosphere that exaggerates their alternate reality from beyond.

Don't believe me? Here, take a look. Bush says, probably believes, he cares about the environment. But, in his alternate reality, that means blowing the tops off mountains in West Virginia, drilling wells and running pipelines through wilderness preserves, and doing everything he can to thwart action on slashing greenhouse gas emissions.

Bush says he wants to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East and I guess he must believe that. But he supports brutal tyrants in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and practically has a fit when people democratically elect Hezbollah to seats in Lebanon's parliament or vote in Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

The man from planet Bush says he wants to build a strong, safe America and he might even believe that too. But he wages an insanely expensive war without end and does it on borrowed money, putting the fiscal equivalent of a burning tire around the necks of future generations and leaving the country to look forward to unnecessary decline. Better yet, he's transformed war itself into a big business with mercenary contractors already matching or exceeding troop levels in Iraq.

Now the government's own General Accounting Office shows that Bush's alternate reality has done it again, this time on his claims about progress in Iraq. From the New York Times:

Over all, the report says, the American plan for a stable Iraq lacks a strategic framework that meshes with the administration’s goals, is falling out of touch with the realities on the ground and contains serious flaws in its operational guidelines.

Newly declassified data in the report on countrywide attacks in May shows that increases in violence during March and April that were touched off by an Iraqi government assault on militias in Basra have given way to a calmer period. Numbers of daily attacks have been comparable to those earlier in the year, representing about a 70 percent decline since June 2007, the data shows.

While those figures confirm the assessments by American military commanders that many of the security improvements that first became apparent last fall are still holding, a number of the figures that have been used to show broader progress in Iraq are either misleading or simply incorrect, the report says.

Administration figures, according to the report, broadly overstate gains in some categories, including the readiness of the Iraqi Army, electricity production and how much money Iraq is spending on its reconstruction.

And the security gains themselves rest in large part not on broad-scale advances in political and social reconciliation and a functioning Iraqi government, but on a few specific advances that remain fragile, the report says. The relatively calm period rests mostly on the American troop increase, a shaky cease-fire declared by militias loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr,

and an American-led program to pay former insurgents to help keep the peace, the report says."

So the guy isn't well-grounded, so what? His time on planet Earth is coming to an end and just months from now he'll take wing and head back to planet Bush. Maybe next time Americans will do better.