Repeat After Me: Up is Down, Black is White

The Bush Administration seems to be living in Bizarro World, where everything is a twisted, funhouse mirror version of what it should be. They hawk Social Security reform on the basis that there’s a fiscal crisis, when there is none. And they sell their rose-tinted vision of Iraq as crisis-free, when everything from protection for troops to fiscal responsibility is in deep crisis.

Now, Bizarro Bush is asking for an additional $80 billion for his non-crisis adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. In an exchange that was prescient of all those would follow between war supporters and anyone even tangentially associated with reality, economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey predicted the invasion of Iraq would cost between $100 billion to $200 billion, but was handily dismissed and contradicted by the administration.

We see now that even he was underestimating our commitment to this folly.

While the Congressional Budget Office estimates that our budget deficit will soar to $386 billion this year (excluding war costs), Bush spends indiscriminately on lavish inaugural celebrations and seeks a constant influx of funds for his wars, despite the fact that they are being spent to line the pockets of war profiteers and create an underclass even within our military, even though we can’t even get the fucking water running for the people we are ostensibly liberating from oppression.

And perhaps my favorite part of the request for more taxpayer-provided booty is this:

It also was expected to include money for building a U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which has been estimated to cost $1.5 billion.

That’s one wicked expensive bull’s-eye.

Of course, in Bizzaro Bush World, the terrorists hate us for our freedom, so indefinitely enslaving us to inflation, joblessness, and the desperate struggle to maintain an American middle class probably seems like our best defense.