- "I guess you'd say I'm a good steward of the land.
The quality of the air is cleaner since I've been the president."
-- President George W. Bush.
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- "Well no wonder you're late. Why, this clock is
exactly two days slow." -- The Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's "Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland."
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- DETROIT - George W. Bush
is totally unhinged and the American people better wake up to the truth
that the commander in chief is out of touch with reality and getting more
dangerous every day. Down is up. Up is down. Failure is victory. Inversion
and absurdity make sense to him.
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- At Friday night's debate, he'd jump out of his chair
and dance around the stage spewing ridiculous nonsense like the Mad Hatter
setting up the tea party in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."
George W. is a champion of the environment. The war in Iraq is an act of
international charity and the violence helps spread democracy in the Middle
East. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, but if he'd had them,
he would have provided them to al-Qaeda. The economy is humming right along,
and the job market is growing everywhere. Tax cuts for the rich and huge
deficits are helping the middle class. The only problem with health care
in America is trial lawyers, and we better watch out, because prescription
drugs from Canada may poison us. And finally, the only damn mistake George
W. ever made in his presidency was appointing people who disagreed with
him.
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- You can't make this stuff up. He's mad. While reflecting
on his physical movements and his ability to say the nonsensical with such
ease, his certitude about everything and his obliviousness about his own
clear failures, I had a eureka moment and understood why. It's mercury
vapors! The president and the Mad Hatter have the very same affliction
and they are incapable of clear thought and making any sense of reality.
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- Felt hats were the rage in Europe and North America in
the 19th century, when Carroll wrote the Alice books and created the Mad
Hatter character. A complicated process turned furs into the finished hats.
Cheaper furs were rubbed with mercurous nitrate to roughen the fibers.
The fibers were then shaved off the skin and turned into felt, which was
then immersed in a boiling acid solution to thicken and harden it.
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- The acid treatment decomposed the mercurous nitrate to
elemental mercury and the poor hatters, working in poorly ventilated workshops,
would breathe in the mercury vapors, unaware of how dangerous and toxic
they were.
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- Mercury is a cumulative poison that causes a host of
maladies, including permanent brain damage. Some of the symptoms are uncontrollable
shaking, anxiety, slurred speech, loss of memory and irritability.
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- The president doesn't want to run the risk of allowing
more affordable prescription drugs from Canada to come into the United
States because he says they might kill us. At the same time, he wants us
to breathe more mercury fumes that are already causing birth defects at
an alarming rate and have made eating fish from about 40 states dangerous
to your health.
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- Let's see. Cheaper prescriptions, no. More mercury-contaminated
air, yes. Only the Mad Hatter and George W. Bush would say that.
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- Bush's order-relaxing rules on mercury emissions from
coal-burning electrical power plants were made to pay political favors
to polluters at the expense of public health.
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- Felice Stadler, a mercury pollution expert at the National
Wildlife Foundation, says that Bush's gift to the corporations "is
a dream come true for energy companies and a nightmare for children's health."
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- The "good steward" also withdrew the United
States from the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty to combat global warming that
requires industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse emissions. The United
States is the biggest greenhouse-gas emitter on the globe, but Bush's boys
purged the phrase "global warming" from the Environmental Protection
Agency's annual report.
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- If the Mad Hatter says it doesn't exist, it doesn't.
Those rising temperatures are really falling. Inhale enough mercury and
you'll think that way.
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- Over the last week, more rattling truth emerged that
didn't seem to make a difference in George W.'s contaminated mind. He's
sticking to his lies and mercury moments, so he'll never be accused of
flip-flopping or being the kind of president who shifts positions.
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- "I don't see how, in a time of war, in a time of
uncertainty, you can change your mind because of politics," Bush twanged
in Friday's debate.
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- He must have forgotten about his opposition to the creation
of the Department of Homeland Security and the 9/11 Commission, and how,
under political pressure, he did a complete about-face and supported both.
Take another whiff of mercury and that might make sense. George W. and
his minions used the argument that aluminum tubes Saddam Hussein bought
were evidence he was planning a nuclear program. That stretch of the facts
got a serious dose of truth, but that doesn't faze the lie-merchants. Remember,
in the 2003 State of the Union address, Bush claimed, "Our intelligence
sources tell us he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes
suitable for nuclear weapons production."
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- Condoleezza Rice earlier sounded the dire warning that
the aluminum was "really only suited for nuclear weapons programs,"
and she followed that false claim with her chillingly infamous line: "We
don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
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- In a masterful article, The New York Times showed Energy
Department experts told Rice's staff and the C.I.A. that the tubes were
probably intended for small artillery rockets and not nuclear weapons.
That was in 2001.
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- Now we learn from the chief weapons inspector that Saddam
had no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and his nuclear program
had decayed long before the contrived invasion.
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- Charles Duelfer, the man the Bush administration picked
to head the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), wrote in his report, "The analysis
shows that despite Saddam's expressed desire to retain the knowledge of
his nuclear team, and his attempts to retain some key parts of the program,
during the course of the following 12 years (after 1991) Iraq's ability
to produce a weapon decayed."
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- Former U.S. Viceroy in Iraq L. Paul Bremer told the Washington
Post, "We never had enough troops on the ground," and, referring
to the looting, "We paid a big price for not stopping it because it
established an atmosphere of lawlessness." Bremer later said he thought
he was speaking "off the record." Oops.
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- The author of the war "on the cheap" plan made
a candid admission himself that he then retreated from. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said he had doubts about possible links between al-Qaeda
and Saddam Hussein. On Oct. 4, he told the Council on Foreign Relations,
"To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links
the two." Quickly, the Pentagon's Web site declared there was "credible
evidence" that al-Qaeda leaders had sought contacts in Iraq to acquire
weapons of mass destruction, and that Rumsfeld's statement was "misunderstood."
How do you misunderstand a simple, declarative sentence in the English
language? Sniff mercury.
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- At one point in Friday's debate, Bush babbled, "I
thought the moderator was telling me my clock was up." The Mad Hatter
couldn't have said it better.
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- http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher184.html
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