June 29, 2005


"And to those watching tonight who are considering a military career, there is no higher calling than service in our Armed Forces."

-- President Bush, making a pitch for new recruits at Fort Bragg, June 28, 2005.


Under the roof of the White House, George Bush has assembled what appears to be the most lethargic unimaginative group of speech meisters ever to gain government employment. The amount of redundancy in his smoke and mirrors show at Fort Bragg was astounding. Virtually every sentence in the speech was plagiarized from previous Bush pep talks, and whole paragraphs were plagiarized from other parts of the same speech. Are we paying these guys? I want a refund. If this is government work, privatize speech writing or outsource it to China.

I can understand why Bush wanted to emphasize certain points given the growing unpopularity of his war of choice. But first, Mr. President, you need to keep the audience awake.

After a complete review of the president’s speech, I managed to shrink it to a seven-minute pep talk:

"Hello. Be seated. Thanks for your sacrifices. You guys can really fight. The terrorists in Iraq are the same bad guys who attacked us on 9/11 and we need to fight them over there before we have to confront them over here. We invaded Iraq because we needed to create a central front on the war on terror. In this we have succeeded. No terrorists were there before the invasion and now we can’t even count them. They’re coming to us -- and that’s exactly where we wanted them. They are horrible and violent people who just want to kill and maim innocents.

Their ideology is to topple governments. All we want is regime change and an opportunity to spread the blessings of democracy to the oil plantations of Araby. Our Saudi allies insist that we need to set up a democratic model in Baghdad. If it works, they might consider allowing women to vote in municipal elections. Mubarak of Egypt has promised to have his security forces refrain from molesting women protesters. The Palestinians are still under Israeli military occupation -- but they can now vote. Because of our occupation of Iraq, freedom is on the march in the Middle East.

Our deepest desire is to plant the seeds of freedom -- so that the desert of tyranny may bloom into fields of liberty flowers -- like the opium poppy fields in Afghanistan. Life is improving in Iraq. Electricity is only slightly less than pre-war levels. We have developed tactics and strategies to secure the road to the airport during daytime hours. The Green Zone is an oasis of peace. As part of our urban planning, we have flattened Fallujah and we are building more prisons to house our Iraqi inmates in less crowded conditions. Even if the Spanish have deserted our ranks, our Mongolian allies are standing shoulder to shoulder with our boys in Iraq. The Iraqis are writing a constitution based on the Iranian and Egyptian models.

The south of Iraq is now a tranquil theocracy where the Badr brigades have instituted the rule of law -- Islamic law. In the north, the Kurds have set up their own autonomous region with a parliament and a president and militias that can take on the Iraqi army. We are building an army along sectarian lines. In fact we have Kurdish brigades patrolling Baghdad and Shiite brigades doing mop up work in Fallujah. In Basra, some of the units in the Iraqi army and police double as Badr brigade. So, they are putting in a lot of over-time and that is good for the Iraqi economy. Saddam is behind bars -- but we can’t set a trial date because he would just use it to embarrass Rummy. So, who needs an exit strategy when things are so swell? If you know anyone who needs a job, have him call one of our army recruiters at '1-800- Bush -- War’. Thanks and God Bless America."


Well, that was the short version. Now, consider what the president actually said. We have rearranged the sentences to prove redundancy but these are his words. And what you are about to read is just the small portion where he paints the insurgency as a bunch of terrorists preparing an assault on New York. He made no mention of WMDs – but he did refer to "lethal weapons" -- meaning IEDs (improvised explosive devices better known as land mines).