[Newspoetry] Twisted and Tortured Logics: BushII2 goes on

[Donald L Emerick]

Senate Backs Higher Debt
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: November 18, 2004 in the New York Times, online.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - Faced with the prospect of a government unable to pay its bills, the Senate voted on Wednesday to raise the federal debt limit by $800 billion.

Though an increase in the debt ceiling was never in doubt, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress postponed action on it last month, until after the elections, to deprive Democrats of a chance to accuse them of fiscal irresponsibility.

The bill, if approved by the House in a vote expected on Thursday, would authorize the third big increase in the federal borrowing since President Bush took office in 2001. Federal debt has ballooned by $1.4 trillion over the past four years, to $7.4 trillion, and the new ceiling would allow borrowing to reach $8.2 trillion.
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Mr. Bush has promised to reduce the deficit by half over five years, though the administration is fighting to make its tax cuts permanent and may need more than $70 billion in extra money next year to support military operations in Iraq.

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::::::::::::::::THIS JUST IN OVER THE WIRES::::::::::::::::

Presidential-Wanna-Be BushII2 today announced a long awaited revision of math standards for his Leave-No-Child-Behind Act (LNCBA).  The LNCBA, you may recall, is central to the Faith-Based Initiative (FBI) of the alleged President's allegedly broad supporting coalition of zealots, witch-hunters (they hunt warlocks and wizards, too), divine-design quasi-scientists, marginalist economic lunatics, insider stock brokers, corporate felons, free-wheeling-gun-toting "individualists", and ungay gay-bashers, and enforcing-mother-hooters (who say, "Every 'child' is sacred until it is born -- after that, we don't give a damn about the actual quality of the world that it leads.  For all we care, it could starve to death, be beaten or abused, or be sent off to die in a foreign war somplace.)

Said BushII2 today:  "LNCBA is not just a make-work program for idle corporations that promote 'testing products'.  Er, I mean, nobody in industry believes in testing products, except by raw Beta tests, where we simply dump the products on the shelf -- and see who survives and who doesn't.  And, we'd always leave a product on the market, even when the survivor rate is low -- if the profit margin was lucrative.  And, I fixed that problem in the first-term, anyway, by promising tort reform measures that would end product liability law as we know it.  Safe and unsafe products can freely compete in the market place, without any bothersome government regulatory standards for safe and pure foods and drugs and products.  You get what you pay for, I always say -- and you know where I stand."

"Oh, yeah, LNCBA, as I was saying, needs some modern fuzzy math revisions.  I knew it when they passed this bill a few months ago, but I thought, oh, well, we can fix this thing later, just as we fix anything that needs fixing -- whether it is a broken agency (the CIA, for instance) or a broken institution (like democratic elections in a country that would be free).  We can fix it.  We are the premier fixer-upper administration in American history.  And, if it ain't broke yet, just you wait and see what I'll have done in the next four years.  I'll fix it up real good -- America will look, socio-politically, like Texas before I'm done in D.C.Land."

"So, anyways, I heard these mathematicians talking about this new fangled idea of infinity.  One of them said 'No mattter what arithmetic you perform on it, infinity remains the same, an unchanged thing.  You can add large numbers to it, subtract large numbers from it, multiply it, divide it -- and it's always the same.'  Now, you know infinity arithmetic sounds like my Budget promises.  (Aside: I wonder if Dick already knew this, when he said 'Deficits don't matter...' but he didn't tell me why (he never does).)"  So, we are rewriting the math standards to include infinity arithmetic.  The first examples in the program will involve budgets and deficits."

"And, thus, I am happy to announce today that I have always already fulfilled my promise to cut the deficit in half.  Shazam, it's infinity's fuzzy math!  It was done as soon as I wished it would be easily done."

White House Education observers said they are intrigued by this new development in LNCBA.  They overheard AG-designate Gonzales speculate that the "curious and quaint" language of the Constitution barring "second-term" presidents from further presidential elections might no longer pose any obstacle, under the new math standards.  "If we could just educate enough of the public fast enough, they'd forget their old-style liberal ideas of what accounting and accountability used to mean."