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BAD DREAMS

President Bush announced today that because American citizens no longer supported any of his policies he had decided to change all of his policies.

To begin with, he was changing his Iraq policy. Instead of staying the course and waiting for victory and withdrawing U.S. troops only when Iraqi troops were ready to take over, the President would begin to withdraw American troops if Iraqi troops were unable to protect them. Since Iraqi troops were unable to protect anyone, including themselves, American troops would be coming home. Now. As soon as Halliburton and Blackwater could get their support troops out of the country.

The President had also decided to change his policy on Iran. His government would no longer try to interfere in the sovereign affairs of another nation. If Iran wanted to waste money on building nuclear weapons, they could do so without protest or interference from the U.S. government. Israel had built nuclear weapons without U.S. protest or interference, and so had Pakistan. Since the U.S. had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons it felt other nations should be able to have two or three.

In fact he was changing his entire Middle East policy. The government would no longer try to control oil and oil prices by sending huge military forces to the area and building hundreds of bases. Since initiating that policy in 2001, oil prices had tripled, the U.S. government had spent more than a trillion dollars, and thousands of lives had been lost. The effort to bring democracy to Middle Eastern countries had resulted in more and more power for radical Islamists who hated the U.S. and President Bush even more than most people.

The new policy would be to withdraw all U.S. forces from all of the Mideast. By 2007 the U.S. would have removed all of its troops. The U.S. was closing all its embassies in the area so that rioters would have nothing to protest. Rioters could have to concentrate on rioting against someone else.

The American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would also change. The U.S. would no longer be selling arms to Israel, or to any other country for that matter, and would give no more economic aid to anyone. Israel was fully capable of defending itself, as it had proved on several occasions. The U.S. would no longer try to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict since the conflict was insoluble, at least by outsiders.

The American policy regarding Cuba and the rest of Latin America would also change. The economic embargo of Cuba, a policy that had been a total failure for fifty years, was to be ended. Americans would be free to go to Cuba and spend money, have a good time, and corrupt the socialist system that Castro had created.

President Bush would no longer fight those governments that were trying to help the poor. If a government like that of Venzuela or Bolivia or Argentina wanted to adopt policies that hurt American corporations but helped their poor, then the U.S. government would cease doing things to try to stop them.

In fact, the American government was no longer going to spend billions every year trying to help American corporations overseas fight the policies of foreign governments. From now on the U.S. government would believe in the free enterprise system and let U.S. corporations fight their own battles, the same way the corporations of all the other capitalist nations do, without any military assistance.

In terms of defense spending the U.S. would immediately cut its defense budget in half, and its spending on Homeland Security and all of the twenty-seven spy agencies by two-thirds. The five hundred billion dollars immediately saved would be spent on education, health care, roads, bridges, and shoring up Social Security and Medicare.

Even after cutting defense spending in half the U.S. would be spending five times as much as any other nation. The U.S. would immediately stop wasting money on building nuclear weapons or doing research into building them. It would stop all research regarding chemical and biological weapons. It would stop developing any new advanced aircraft, ships, tanks, artillery. The U.S. already had more advanced aircraft, ships, tanks and artillery than it would use in a century and more than most of the rest of the world put together.

As for the spy agencies, it was clear that they were pretty useless. They kept getting bigger and bigger and intelligence kept getting worse and worse. Besides, since we were getting out of the business of invading countries or threatening them we were no longer creating enemies we had to spy on. Instead of creating new spy agencies every year, the new policy was to cut two a year until there were only three left. That should take only a decade.

With all the money that would be saved from cutting money used to maim, kill, occupy, oppress, jail, torture, and spy on people the President would be able to cut taxes twice as fast as he had been. But this time instead of giving all the tax breaks to his rich friends he would restrict all the tax cuts to workers. He would end the payroll tax. He would let workers make up their own income figures for tax purposes, and cheat like all businesses and businessmen. That should reduce the tax workers pay considerably.
I
n terms of protecting the U.S. from terrorists, Islamic terrorists were angry at the U.S. because it kept bombing and occupying and threatening Arab and Moslem nations. Since our new policy ended all bombing, occupying and threatening, the terrorists would have to find other nations and people to be angry with and blow up.

In short our new policy was to go from being the most militaristic, warlike, threatening, and murderous nation in the world to the most peaceful nation in the world. Terrorists throughout the world would have to join the unemployments lines.

And then President Bush woke up and realized with relief that it had all just been a horrible nightmare.

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