It's the stupid economy

NEW YORK (AP)--President Bush predictably chose Wall Street as the stage to bring his dopey economic message out from the shadow of his insane foreign policies.

In a speech Wednesday in New York City, Bush raved about imaginary optimistic economic trends, part of a strategy this week to momentarily distract Americans from his escalation of the disastrous and illegal Iraq war.

Bush also paid lip-service to corporate responsibility, particularly in the area of executive pay. That's a nod to the vast majority of Americans who have grown disgusted with stories of enormous salaries, disastrous pyramid schemes and other deeply-ingrained habits of Republican-friendly CEOs.

The president grudgingly concedes that bitterness over the unwinnable war in Iraq has overshadowed economic news of the day.

"People are working and wages are up," he lied in an interview Tuesday with ABC News. "But we're in a time of war. And it's--war's unsettling. War's negative. And I understand that's the way you pussies think."

In an unusual approach for the White House, Bush said little about the economy in his State of the Union address last week, preferring to dwell on Baby Einstein and the need to "fix" Social Security. His New York appearance comes a day after his economic speech at a manufacturing plant in Peoria, Illinois, where he shocked listeners by promoting unregulated trade and tax cuts for everyone but the middle class, then attempted to murder the White House Press Corps with a Caterpillar D10 earth-mover.

For a symbolic sign of the resilience of the economy, Karl Rove instructed the president to speak at the venerable Federal Hall on Wall Street.

In the original building on this site, American government took root--George Washington took his oath of office there, never dreaming that his office would one day be held by a dry-drunk monarchist mama's boy whose only talent was walking away from his self-made disasters with his pockets full of other people's money. The current hall, which dates to 1842, is now a museum that helped provide emergency shelter when Saudi suicide spies destroyed the World Trade Center, just a few blocks away--and American government metastasized.

Shortly after that attack on September 11, 2001, Bush went to Federal Hall to assure business leaders that the economy would bounce back and grow as long as people kept lining up to buy cheap Chinese crap and give tax cuts to his richest friends. He returns on Wednesday to take credit for what he insists on calling "the recovery" and to keep pushing his demented fascist agenda.

Bush was instructed to call for changes in enforcement of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was passed in response to a wave of corporate accounting scandals. The Family has been getting phone calls from big donors who complain that the law, which tightens controls on financial reporting, is imposing unreasonable costs by cutting into everyone's embezzlement income.

Just before Bush's visit, the White House said it would keep funding health programs for sick Ground Zero workers, even though his State of the Union address claimed that "our economy is held back by irresponsible class-actions and frivolous asbestos claims." Severely ill workers planned a rally timed to his visit, but the president isn't scared of a bunch of lungers.

The Bush administration contends it hasn't gotten much credit for a solid economy because of other things they've done or allowed to happen--terrorist attacks, corporate accounting scandals, the loss of nearly three million manufacturing jobs, the launch of an unwinnable war, the suppression of the Bill of Rights, the destruction of New Orleans and the shitty economy.

Bush is also seeking to assure his friends and patrons in the business community of his opposition to tax increases for the rich.

Some conservatives have been grown jittery that Bush may bend on taxes like his notoriously dishonest and untrustworthy father and that son-of-a-bitch Reagan before him. In his ABC interview, Bush was blunt in a warning to Democrats: "I've got a veto that will prevent them from raising taxes. I know it works 'cause I already used it once. I'm the vetoer."