Performance Review for Mr. Bush?

Performance Review

So, tonight our fearless Leader will be delivering his State of the Union Address, and we can expect the same platitudes, lies and hackneyed inflections as we’ve always gotten from Mr. Bush. Personally, I’m not going to bother listening, I’ll just read through the recap tomorrow. I know that’s not very sporting of me but I just can’t listen to that man’s voice any more. It’s not like I have much of a choice anyway: The moment his droning tones begin my brain starts to liquify and my eyes glaze over…and I find myself truly thinking about nothing. This happens because his “Big Speech Thing” voice, which sounds like a bored 4th-grader reading a book he doesn’t understand, acts like a bucket of water thrown on the fuse box and none of my circuits work until it dries off. Let’s be fair and remember that there are so few inspiring or even interesting State of the Union speeches (unless you’re a Washington Post analyst) that we can actually list them on a cocktail napkin in 14pt font. But you add in Mr. Bush’s two-digit IQ and naked policy pandering to the ultra-wealthy, to religious fanatics and to the military-industrial complex, and it’s just unendurable.

I think we need a change in the format of the S.O.T.U. address. I think there need to be some stipulations, some requirements, which the President must adhere to.

First off, let’s remember a point so easily forgotten:

The President of the United States of America is meant to represent the wishes, needs and goals of the People of the United States of America. Period. He’s not there to do what he thinks is best all the time, but what the people tell him they want him to do. To do what THEY think is best.

So, I think the President, in his State of the Union, should answer to the major complaints made against him by the people. He should directly answer how he has either fixed or ignored the issues that have plagued his presidency and that the people have repeatedly drawn attention to. If he hasn’t fixed them, he should have to provide direct evidence, not vague statements that blur the focus, why he hasn’t been able to or even tried to fix the problem. More to the point, why has the President consistently failed to effectively bring about the issues at which even HE promised to succeed?

Example? Mr. Bush, at his second inaguaration, promised significant progress in these areas (among others):

* Better Education for Children
* Strong Defense
* Security for Retirement Savings
* Better & Less Expensive Health Care for ALL Americans

Umm, can anyone legitimately contend that he’s effectively addressed even ONE of those issues?

• School funding, on both a state and federal level has gone down nearly every year this man’s been in office. Sure, there has been some window dressing in highly-trumpeted spending bills, but as far as effective funding, just ask any principal or Regional Superintendant across the United States where the money's gone and you'll get the same blank stare that Mr Bush gives when asked what the hell he was doing during the Vietnam War.
• Strong defence? Please. All this means is the sluice is yanked out to let hundreds of bilions of state (tax) dollars into defense contractors' coffers and the like (Halliburton, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, anyone?). This country is FAR, FAR less safe than it was before he took office. It is that way simply because the Bush administration and his corporate cronies don’t care. It’s about the money and the power, pure and simple. We have made more enemies, killed more of our own people than perished on 9/11 and spent our country into an economic ice age since Mr. Bush took office.
• Security for Retirement Savings? Wages have gone down and the median home price has gone UP, which is one significant detractor from American familes being able to even establish a retirement savings, much less have one to protect. More companies send CEOs off with 300 million dollar severance packages while simultaneously firing huge percentages of their workforces and cutting back on 401k and other employee benefit financial programs. Social Security has been pushed closer to the precipice with Mr. Bush’s efforts to privatize the accounts themselves than it ever has been, and any alert member of American citizenry knows that it won’t be long now…
• Health care is in worse shape with every year that passes in this country. More families now live without a drop from the health care faucet than in 2000 (look it up). An overnight stay in most hospitals in America is more expensive than it was in 2000 and an astounding number of major employers in this country have either made their health care programs more expensive or in some cases cut them out entirely. And most of those lucky enough to still be able to afford the premiums have found the actual quality of the health care itself has plummeted. The medical industry is out of control, and all this administration has done is to willfully encourage this kind of patient-fleecing behavior to continue.

So, how many of my readers (all 3 of them) have ever had to sit through the yearly or bi-early Performance Review at their job? Sometimes it’s more than just worrying about getting a raise or not, there's genuine concern about keeping your job! Employers will be thoroughly prepared to hit you with tough questions about your failures and it will be up to you to deflect them (with facts if possible, not grandiose statements of intent and motivations read from those cheeseball posters on the breakroom walls) and sell your own genuine successes at the job.

Now why doesn’t our President have to do that? Why does he get to fail miserably at his job and, far worse than that, actually betray the people whom he is meant to represent! He has poisoned our homeland, murdered our people and hundreds of thousands abroad…earned us vicious and powerful enemies in fantatical religious groups as well as seriously threatening states. Mr. Bush has ignored his people repeatedly and flagrantly ignored or attacked the Constitution and the tattered remnants of the Bill of Rights.

Why does he still have a job?

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