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02/03/2005: "The Crawford Diet"

We interrupt the regularly scheduled topic arc on Bush’s Bad Bet to bring late-breaking news from the President’s State of the Union Address. Most listeners focused on what Bush had to say about foreign and domestic political policy, but the most significant item to come out of the speech was his exciting new diet plan. Bush is of course very health conscious and is justifiably well known for his rigorous exercise program. He knows that exercise is not enough and has thus equal interest in diets. Of course, even the President can’t get away with enthusing about his diet ideas in the traditional annual address to Congress and the Nation. There might be just too many eyebrows raised, even when that’s what he’d prefer to be talking about (considering that all that other stuff is hard work.) He thus needs to talk about his diet discoveries using codewords. We at SherWright.com are, to be immodest, noted experts in deciphering coded Dittohead speech and are thus in a position to aid the President in sharing his diet discoveries with the Country at large. So here it is: The Crawford Diet. The objective is to deal with weight gained over four years of pigging out. The diet consists of large daily portions of big rolls with layers of butter, ice cream, cheesecake, cherry pie, and a belly-busting slab of prime rib. In addition, the diet makes allowances for impulse eating, properly recognizing that people have cravings. You can thus eat pretty much anything you want in whatever portion size best suits the moment. Indeed, at some point in the future - say 2042 - you may be hungry, so shouldn’t you eat now when you’re sure you can? So how can all of this be a plan for dealing with weight gain? We now come to the deprivation part of the diet: you have to give up broccoli. That’s all there is to it. For readers who do not see the connection between the literal words of the President’s address and his newly-revealed diet, we’ll now provide a more detailed translation. The ice cream, cheesecake, and cherry pie represent the President’s plans for increased government spending as mentioned in the address, including his tax free heath savings accounts, his energy company corporate welfare program, and money for Palestinians. The calories in the rolls and butter do not need to be counted because they are “off the books,” just like the hundreds of billions of spending on our Iraqi adventure. The big slab of prime rib is Bush code for red-meat permanent tax cuts, the same cuts that in their temporary, partial form added trillions to the national debt. The “impulse eating” portion of the diet is represented by Bush’s desire to move from pay-as-you-go funding for social security to private account finding, a transition estimated to cost about two trillion dollars. What is the broccoli? It’s the decreases in unidentified discretionary spending on programs that Bush doesn’t particularly care for anyway. So what kind of results can you expect from the Crawford Diet? You need to first note that this is not a weight loss diet. The objective is to slow down the rate at which you are gaining weight, just like the Bush Administration’s fiscal objective of cutting the deficit in half. Will the President’s plan and his diet meet their objectives? It really comes down to how the calories in the broccoli equate to the calories in the other goodies. Once cause for concern is that the discretionary portion of the federal budget makes up only 16% of the total, and the broccoli part is a much smaller proportion of that. On the other side of the ledger, Bush’s new spending proposals amount to trillions in new spending. Hmmm. I guess we’re just going to have to chalk it down as the world’s first faith-based diet!