This is not a blog post
by Dover Bitch

Another day, another McCain advisor thrown under the bus for accidentally telling the truth about his candidate’s indifference to the struggles of ordinary Americans. John Goodman “said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance.”

“So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime,” Mr. Goodman said. “The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American — even illegal aliens — as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

“So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved.”

This is nothing new, of course. Just a year ago, Bush made the same argument:

The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.

Ronald Reagan pioneered this art when he justified his lack of decent funding for school lunches by redefining ketchup as a vegetable.

Still, before Bush became president, the idea you could solve problems simply by calling them victories was a concept reserved for satirists. Or something only a governor would get away with.

George Bush and his sidekick, John McCain, have really taken it to a new level. They redefined “hunger” as “very low food security” in order to salvage their domestic record. They redefined squirting guacamole at Taco Bell as a “manufacturing job” to salvage their jobs record. They are trying to redefine contraception as abortion.

They redefined what a stream is in order to open them up to the coal industry. They’ve tried to redefine carbon dioxide in order to allow more pollution. They redefined “privacy.” They redefined “overtime.” They tried to redefine toxic sludge to justify defunding Superfund. They redefined the Vice President as a fourth branch of government. They redefined “organic.” They redefined “torture” and the Geneva Conventions.

They prevented NASA from talking about global warming or even mentioning the Big Bang. They don’t want irradiated food labelled. They even fought to prevent meatpackers from testing their own cattle for Mad Cow disease.

And I haven’t even started on all the people who were kicked to the curb for predicting the costs of the Iraq War would be tremendous. Or the way they hid the real costs of the GOP’s health care bill.

That’s how they solve problems. Two plus two equals four? No problem! “Two plus [redacted] equals five!”

McCain’s plan is to deliver the exact same prescriptions for the “whiners” in a “mental recession:” Out of sight, out of mind.

I’m sure you all may be getting speeched out this week (with so many more to come), but if you get a chance and you haven’t read it before, check out Mark Danner’s 2007 commencement address to a group of Department of Rhetoric graduates at UC Berkely.