Current mood:

aggravated

Open Letter to Dubya:
Dear Mr. President (and I use the term loosely),

How nice for you that you returned in one piece from your surprise trip to Iraq, so neatly timed to various assasinations and low approval ratings. It was a welcome breath of fresh air when my local news stations' biggest story previously was 'whether Big Ben would play in the opening football game in September.' So nice to see them covering something important, but I digress.

I must say Mr. President, that while you are quite jubiliant, your handling of the press conference after was grossly unprofessional, even for you. Perhaps no one notified you that you were being broadcast live on national television on all major networks. Or your teleprompter was as jet-lagged as you claimed to be. In any case, when speaking about the future of Iraq (since we've already established that the poor and middle class in this country have no future and can go screw themselves), it looks particularly poor when you 'joke around' with the reporters and have to ask them to repeat parts of their question because you can't keep your attention on the matter at hand long enough to complete the usual political non-answer. (And we wonder why our country is in the state it's in.)

As for your policy, I must say your idea to send various US government officials to the Middle East to advise their Iraqi counterparts is quite novel. I'd have more faith in the idea if the various bureaucracies were actually doing good work here and our own country weren't in crisis. After all, yours is the administration to ignore the Kyoto Accords, open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling, and destroy the education system with the No Rich Child Left Behind Act (yet we have a high school drop out rate in this country of 1 in 3 unless I have the numbers wrong.) An administration that plans for the future would actually have a functional emergency management agency and would not have entire cities flooded because they couldn't build levees and pumps. (It would also have actually done something to rebuild those cities now instead of waiting for the next season to flood the city again.) An administration that cared about the future would not be selling our middle class and skilled jobs to India, our lower class jobs to illegal immigrants, and undercutting our education for specialty jobs (and stifling technological and research advancement) then tell us all about the economic gains we've had this quarter. Really? Anyone else feeling the growth brought on by tax cuts? Any of you actually living in the US?

So in closing Mr. President, as a member of the new working poor (we used to be middle class, but we won't be for long), may I suggest you spend your next five day weekend on a hunting getaway with Dick Cheney? (Just make sure you shoot first.)

nawilla