If there’s one thing Bush has shown himself incredibly adept at (and there may only be one thing), it’s his uncanny ability to talk tough about something but completely omit any specifics. Today’s example comes in his talks about “compromise” in the whole SCHIP debate.
“If putting poor children first takes a little more than the 20 percent increase I have proposed in my budget for SCHIP, I am willing to work with leaders in Congress to find the additional money,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.
You have to remember that in Bush’s world, “working with” someone means finding a way to convince them to let him do what he wanted to do anyway. There should be a word for his definition of a compromise. It would be fined as “acting like you want to come to an agreement but flatly refusing anything that contradicts you.”
These statements really hearken back to his talks about getting off of our oil addiction. Lot of talk, not a whole lot of followup. Or his more recent yammering at the UN about finding a way to do something about global warming while not mentioning anything along the lines of, y’know, what he plans to do about it. George Bush may be the king of the empty promise. Or, hell, the empty non-promise.
Also notice that he said that they need to “find” the original money. As if the United States isn’t dumping absurd amounts of money into, say, Iraq. Congress wanted $35 billion over five years. That’s $7bil a year, meanwhile we’re pumping $190bil into Iraq and Afghanistan just this year. Bush’s proposal? $5 billion.
He says it’s because he doesn’t want the federal government controlling your medicine, while keeping a pointless war going. So apparently it’s all right for the government to send Americans to their deaths, but not okay to try and keep them alive and healthy. Good stuff, Dubya.
