I am sick to death of playing "follow the weasel."
Bush floats some cockamamie idea, and we fall all over ourselves perpetuating it by negation. As any cognitive scientist will tell you, any sentence beginning with "Don't..." immediately predisposes the listener to think expressly about the concept we want to negate.
The only way to kill an idea is to replace it. So let us argue in favor of alternative agendas. Rather than say "no, don't do that," let us say "do this." Offer proposals and force Bush to be the obstructionist. Kill his proposals by ignoring them and burying them with initiatives of our own.
The following open letter to the president is a demonstration of this approach.
As with my previous open letters (The Abandonment Society, Gambling with Social Security, Justice and Public Protection, and George Bush is Weak), you may of course feel free to steal this one as an LTE or to send to the White House.
Mr. President, with all due respect, shut up.
The government is wasting our money in this country, and you're making it worse.
You heard me. You're wasting our money. We face serious economic, criminal, health, and security crises today, and your government refuses to invest our money wisely to combat them.
Every dollar spent on early childhood health and development returns seven in reduced crime, increased security, reduced poverty, and increased productivity.
Investing in sustainable energy development can eliminate our need for overseas oil and lift the burden of pollution from our health care budgets and from our economy.
The CDC has known since 1999 that investment in preventive health care returns as much as twenty-nine times the initial expense.
Yet, instead of investing in these areas with known returns, you would cut these programs while increasing spending in the least productive areas of our budget.
Over one fifth of the latest budget you proposed -- one which reduces investment in our national infrastructure, our children, and our health -- is spent on the military.
What return can we expect on that money? Nothing. Zip. In fact, less than zero: we will kill thousands more Iraqi citizens and our soldiers as well. Your elective war in Iraq has worsened the security situation, generating thousands of terrorist recruits by using the same tactics employed by Israel in its endless guerrilla war with the Palestinians.
There's a word for a steward who, knowing of a profitable investment for his charge, chooses instead to be wasteful: irresponsible.
Invest our money wisely, sir, or stand aside so that we can do what you will not.
You are behaving irresponsibly by ignoring our children, our health, our schools, our economy, and our security. In short, you are letting our infrastructure rot while you choose to play global wargames with the lives of our bravest brothers and sisters.
In fact, not only are you helping to waste our money, you're wasting our time.
Iraq, as shown by the Duelfer report, was not a crisis requiring our intervention. Social Security, as shown by the Congressional Buget Office, is not a crisis requiring our intervention.
Yet you insist that these are the crises of today? That we must drop our tools, stop building America, and run over to see your latest phony "emergency"? How many times will you cry "wolf" before you become entirely irrelevant?
Mr. President, stop wasting our time.
We have genuine crises on our hands, right here, right now.
Lead, follow, or get the hell out of our way.
Regards,
a citizen