Because I told them it had to

Last night I watched the “The Libertine,” a movie set in the 17th century. There was a credit for the company that supplied the mud.

According to AP, the US has been conducting more air strikes inside Somalia this week. Funny how that wasn’t mentioned in the SOTU. How many countries have we actually had military operations in since 9/11? Does even the Pentagon remember? Forty years from now American Marines they completely forgot deploying are going to be coming out of jungles in the Philippines or Yemen or wherever, asking if The War Against Terror (TWAT) is over yet, like those Japanese soldiers they were still finding in the 1970s.

Nancy Pelosi says that Bush, asked why this “surge” would work when the previous ones didn’t, told her, “Because I told them it had to.” Makes you wonder what he’s been telling him the last four years.

Today Bush went to a hospital in Missouri to talk about health insurance. He talked about how doctors practice “too much medicine” for fear of “frivolous lawsuits,” but made no mention of how one should deal with incompetent doctors.

Neither did he see anything wrong with the practices of insurance companies, although several small-business owners stood up to talk about how they couldn’t get insurance for their employees. No, the problems in American medicine are 1) the tax system, which doesn’t encourage enough people to give their money to insurance companies, and 2) sick people, who are all like, me me me, without giving a thought to what their sickness is costing those poor insurance companies. “And our view is, is that in order to have -- to worry about health care costs, the more a consumer is involved, the more likely we’ll be able to deal with the increasing cost of health care.” Those sick people just aren’t worrying enough, they’re all, la la la, I’m sick, cure me.

By the way, Bush claims that his proposal is revenue-neutral. It’s amazing how he can always solve all our problems without spending a cent of federal money.

I’ll leave the summation in Bush’s own words, which is cruel of me, I know: “we’ve got to level the playing field, from a taxes perspective. It is by far the most hopeful and fair option of any medical health care option out there today, unless, of course, you want the federal government providing it all, saying, okay, we’ll provide you insurance, but we’ll provide everybody insurance, which would be a mistake.”