My first quote is from one of those critters we call "journalists" these days. In an article about the supposedly booming economy, the writer notes, near her lead:
The best barometer of the country's economic fitness — gross domestic product — increased at a 3.4 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department reported Friday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070727/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/economy
I'm not an economist, granted, but I wonder how can GDP be a measure of economic fitness at all? It's a measure of activity and activity has nothing inherently to do with fitness. Look at it this way: a person could spend a year stuffing themselves with McDonalds, suffer a coronary, get hospitalized and subjected to all kinds of expensive treatments and therapies, and then sue the hospital for malpractise and McDonalds for false advertising, to which McDonalds would respond not by improving its food, but with a new advertising campaign touting the fitness of its food (yes I am stealing from that documentary , Supersize Me, a little).
All that would be economic activity, great for the GDP. But it sure as heck would have nothing to do with fitness of any kind.
-----------------------------------------------
My second quote today is from that literary master, George W. Bush. Praising British PM Gordon at their press conference, he said:
"There's no doubt in my mind," he said, "that Gordon Brown understands that failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the security of our own countries, that failure in Iraq would embolden extremist movements throughout the Middle East, that failure in Iraq would basically say to ... people sitting on the fence around the region that Al Qaeda is powerful enough to drive great countries like Great Britain and America out of Iraq before the mission is done."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-ex-bush31jul31,0,678042...
How does this kind of crazy talk walk impeded, and unnoticed, out of the mouths of our supposed Great Leader (or was that Decider?)? He's basically saying that "This Great Nation" is locked into a game of Chicken with a band of homicidal maniacs!! Oh, and Britain too! No, more than that, I'm sure he means The Entire English Speaking World!!
All because he made a mistake and refuses to admit it, or didn't make a mistake and refuses to admit it (depending on how much benefit of the doubt one gives him).
__________________________
