Quack, quack

Imagine those quacks sound like they're from a duck with a broken leg, or perhaps wing. Either way, a lame duck.

I'm starting to think the President is having a race with himself to see who can become a lame duck first.

Arlen Specter, among other Republican centrists, was asking Alberto Gonzales some genuinely hard questions about wiretapping. Here's the deal with wiretapping: Bush and friends want to keep doing it, and no one really knows why. It takes maybe an hour to obtain a warrant from the FISA courts to order a wiretap. This warrant can even be obtained retroactively -- that's right, if it's an emergency, they don't have to worry about the warrant until two days later. Why Bush, Rumsfeld, and Gonzales don't just concede and let the legislature win this one is far beyond me. I think it's a bit of playground bully syndrome, kind of a "how dare you tell me what to do?" thing for our esteemed executive branch. Or maybe they watch way too much '24.'

That's not the half of it, either. It looks like some of his supporters are willing to march lock step with the Bushies on this one, especially since Rove has been calling Republican senators into his office and threatening consequences if they don't vote with Bush this time (1), but boy, are they mad about his new budget.

Remember all the talk about saving Social Security? Bush is cutting the budget for Social Security. Maybe he's trying to force Congress' hand in privatizing it, but I think it's more likely that he's just a buffoon who figures he won't be needing it anyway.

Remember when they were trying to court AARP's support by talking about Medicare and Medicaid? Yeah, those are getting cut, too. Same with education. Same with block grants for agencies like Meals on Wheels.

Yeah, just about all of the social programs that are keeping our European friends from considering us a hopelessly backwards nation are being cut. Where's the money going? Defense, of course. I mean, who cares if we're all poor and starving and shooting at each other, so long as no one from outside is shooting at us? Hmm...

By the way, his talk about reducing our dependence on foreign oil was a joke. Completely hypothetical, according to US Secretary of Energy. Ha, ha. In the meantime, Sweden expects it can be completely off of fossil fuels in 15 years. Their government is even pushing them in that direction -- weird.

Furthermore, his State of the Union sounded like a lame duck address. He talked about the energy thing (as mentioned above, his Secretary of Energy jumped ship on that the next day), he kept his same old line about Iraq and National Security, and that was about it. Nothing new, really. The energy stuff was to distract people from what a miserable job he's doing, and the Iraq stuff was to keep his supporters blindly following him.

Maybe the next three years (oh, man) won't be as painful as the first five.

(1) http://www.insightmag.com/Media/MediaManager/Rove2.htm