GETTING ALL POLITICAL

Here's an email rant I just sent to some friends:

Okay, so just one more email and then I'll shut up about politics.

The one cool thing about the devastation that George W. Bush has been responsible for is that he's actually mobilized people. The reaction to the State of the Union address was completely different in my social circles than it's ever been before. People rarely pay much attention to it--if they like the president, they assume he's going to continue to do a fairly good job, and if not, they figure it's going to be more business-as-usual rubbish.

But most of my friends, this time, were actually actively looking forward to watching/viewing it. The impetus was sort of, "He's got this nonsense going on in Iraq, he's just made this statement about putting people on Mars, the economy is in the toilet, WHAT ON EARTH IS HE GOING TO SAY?!" And most of the people I know--even the ones in the UK--are really well-informed at this point about what is *really* going on.

For me, one of the most annoying statements that I keep hearing Bush make, that he again made in his speech, was, "The pace of economic growth in the third quarter of 2003 was the fastest in nearly 20 years." Which is absolutely true.

Do you know why this is? Because we hit the lowest point since the depression of the 1920s. Let's assign some random numbers here for illustrative purposes: When you're at the top, and you grow a little, this is "very little growth". Yes, the difference between +20 and +21 is very small.

What has Bush done? He took the economy down to -87, and now that it's been raised to -60 in the space of a single quarter, he's talking about the triumph of the quickest economic growth in 20 years.

Wow, you're right! What a triumph! Much better than the years before, in which the numbers pretty much just hovered around 20 and 21! You have my vote! (I am looking for a link with information on this statistic.)

Please tell me that people are not really this stupid.

How about the way he crowed on about unemployment going down? How many articles should I link to about how the "jobless" rate has gone down because "jobless" is defined as someone who is actively seeking work, and there's a higher rate of people giving up on finding it?

http://www.rutlandherald.com/News/Story/69528.html

Yes, another triumph for our fearless leader. (NB: I may have mentioned that when I asked my brother why "jobless people" didn't mean "people without jobs," he said that people who have no jobs because they have given up looking "aren't jobless, they're just beerless.")

Yes, 1,000 new jobs created in the holiday months! Unfortunately, over 100,000 were to be expected:

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0401/09/nfcnn.05.html

based on normal trends.

Furthermore, when he talks about the creation of new jobs, he uses statistics regarding the total number of jobs being filled, and not the number of people working. Why? Because there is now a higher percentage of people who can not get by working one job alone, and so are taking more than one:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t13.htm

Gaaaaah.

Shutting up now.

No, really, I mean it.

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials