Well done, all the way through, and to a point where no harm can come to him what cooked it.
I am a big fan of meat. I like meat. I eat meat with every meal except for breakfast. I just find it to be delicious. But of course meat must be cooked all the way through, and as I've had a few nasty bouts with food poisoning over the years, I make it a point to cook my meat thoroughly.
The Bush Adminstration is no doubt full of meat lovers (they are all fat, they enjoy killing helpless animals, and have health conditions derived from poor food choice) and I can only presume that they treat their books and records the same way they treat their meat. Raw meat is disgusting, but after it's been properly cooked and seasoned and garnished it's quite appetizing. The same is true of raw data and the cooked statistics that Dubya and friends are serving us.
Despite the fact that every time I go to the grocery store prices have gone up again (and I go once a week). Despite the fact that out of all my friends, I am the only one luckily enough to be fully employed (most are resorting to low-paying jobs that do not make use of their education and training). Despite the fact that gas went back up to $4 a gallon last weekend. Despite all this, the economy grew, joblessness is at 5%, and inflation isn't so bad.
I don't think it takes a lot of thought to realize that such grand numbers in the face of such grim realities stinks of bullshit.
A lot of people see nnumbers as impartial. "Numbers don't lie," as the saying goes. And the numbers themselves do not, they merely represent what they are meant to. The problem comes with the fact that it's easy to tinker with them. You no doubt have noticed how crime always goes down in an election year in terms of numbers, whether or not it does in reality, because a lot of crimes are either re-labeled, re-classified, or simply pulled from the statistics, in order to make the mayor/sheriff/whatever look better. This happens on a national scale as well, and this sort of institutionalized book cooking has been going on forever. It's just the natural result of the fact that the people who collect and distribute the figures are the same people who benefit from them. And that sort of conflict of interest is impossible to resist, even when good political leaders are in power.
While it would be nice to have an independent group of number crunchers who did nothing but discover and report the truth, we don't have one and we won't get one. What we need to do is remember that if Dubya is going to lie us into a pointless war, then he's also going to lie about us in terms of statistics. We're one of the few countries who doesn't count peopole who have given up looking for work as "unemployed." I'm sure that explains why we tend to have about half as much unemployment as countries who do, yet are similar in terms of economy and social welfare. Also we index our inflation to a number of products, including houses and cars. What with the price of cars and houses collapsing in the credit crunch, is it any wonmder that inflation appears to be under control even though some day-to-day goods have gone up 30-40% in the past few years?
Nixon was the first to start really cooking the books, Regan made it worse, Bush made it worse, Clinton made it worse, and Dubya took it to a high art form. What we need to do is call bullshit on these numbers, and fling them back at the lying sods who spouted them out to us. You know and I know that unemployment is a lot worse than just a four year low. You and I know that inflation is going nuts, that the credit crunch has dried up all our funds, and that if we even have a job, it's certainly not the sort we want.
Just don't let yourself fall into the trap of self-deceit when deep dwon you know the truth. You've never trusted Dubya before. Don't start.