A Kill of Beans

All of a sudden-like, Dumbleyou is a fiscal conservative… FLASH: Bush faces first veto override with vote on water bill.

Geez, I wasn't sure whether to write about this, or Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Guiliani tonight. It’s been awhile since I’ve had the luxury of being politically outraged/amused. But tonight’s headlines have just been too generous for a recovering political blogger to ignore.

I reckon there’ll be plenty of time to mock Rudy for seeking the support of a man whose last endorsement was for a protein powder that the elderly Elmer Gantry claimed allowed him to leg-press 2,000 pounds. With support like that, Rudy doesn’t need me piling on. I’m sure there will be plenty of bloggers, both left and right of center, who will have great fun with The Robertson Bump among the crazy demographic. (My personal favorite Robertson endorsement was the one about 15, 20 years ago where he warned that a tidal wave was set to descend upon and obliterate the land-locked city of Chicago, Illinois. That one had my Mom on the phone pleading with my Chicago-based brother to take his family and head for higher ground lest they get washed away to lake.)

I’m more compelled to examine the promise of the first Bush veto override in his overlong perch at the top of our country’s government. A full year after the Democrats took the House back, and we finally have the first official, actionable evidence of same.

Now, it would be easy to harangue our spineless dullard elected representatives for their continued capitulation to Bush on everything from Iraq War spending to caving into his latest torture-challenged Attorney General candidate (come on, if nobody died and wasn't revived before permanent brain damage set in, can we reeeeally call it torture? It’s such a grey area…), but instead I choose to celebrate their unexpected recollection of where they left their collective cajones.

And to point out that the only pork-barrel spending Bush disapproves of spending seems to be the kind that would promote medical research, insure poor people’s children and rebuild parts of the country devastated by Katrina, among other natural disasters. CNN.com reports, “Bush spiked the measure [last] Friday despite its overwhelming bipartisan support, calling it too costly and complaining that the 900 projects it authorized would overtax the Army Corps of Engineers.”

‘Overtax the Army Corp of Engineers.’ I suppose it might, considering they’re mostly currently all tied up in Iraq building and rebuilding stuff that keeps getting blown up again by the indigenous people who want us the fuck out of there.

I tell you what, this George W Bush is just lower than a snake’s belly. He shoves through ‘supplemental’ after supplemental (ie: off-the-books billions, not accounted for in the official annual budget he presents to Congress, even after 5 years of war) to fund his disastrous nation-building policy in Iraq - his opposition to nation-building being a central plank of his 2000 run for the White House - and tries his damnedest to scuttle money to help protect New Orleans from future natural disasters, which money he promised in a live Presidential address.

Whatever this guy promises you with his words to the camera, you can bet he’ll try to keep from happening behind the scenes. I’d wager they have a word for that kind of fella down Texas way, and it's probably not a very nice word.

I’m too lazy to go research the figures, but the $23 billion he tried to kill by vetoing this legislation for actual homeland security-related initiatives amounts to about how many hours of prosecution of his stupid, failed war, do you suppose?

And it’s that level of hypocrisy that moved me to comment. Kudos to our Congressional representatives for proving that all politics is indeed local. Some of these idiots even apologized to Bush in their statements of non-support for his veto (“We’re very sorry for putting our constituents’ needs ahead of your ego’s…”) — Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, I’m looking at you.

But in the end, it looks like Bush may actually be compelled to [gasp] not only keep a promise, but do the right thing by the less-advantaged. That’s gotta be a bitter pill to swallow.

Well, he’ll always have Iraq. Here’s looking at you, junior…