Wednesday, February 7

In other words…

You gotta love the title of the presidential speech delivered Tuesday at a Micron Technology office in Virginia. It's …

Wait. I want you to guess.

Think about it for a few seconds. What title would the president give his speech to the good people of Micron? I'll give you two hints: It's not about technology. And don't forget that Bush submitted his proposed budget the day before.

Come up with your best guess and post it in comments. Be fanciful, be serious, I don't care.

You can find the answer here, with the text of the speech.

The thing that jumped out at me, besides the ludicrous title, is Bush's use of the phrase, "in other words." He uttered that phrase 19 times in this address. The speech, when read, comes off as the work of a high school salutatorian who is trying to prove that he's smarter than the valedictorian.

Excerpts:

Like, if you're confident in what you make, you ought to be for trade, because people are going to want to buy what you make. Ninety-five percent of the customers in the world live outside the United States. I mean, we're 5 percent of the population; 95 percent is elsewhere.

…It's probably counterintuitive to some, particularly those who tend to trust government, but, see, I believe it is not only possible, we have proven it through a document, that by keeping taxes low and being wise about how we spend your money, we actually achieve balance in the budget.

…One of the things I presume you expect us to do is analyze programs. In other words, if they say, this is going to do this, and the results aren't there, I think the American people expect us to eliminate those programs or cut the programs back or not fund them, and that's exactly what we do. It's a little hard sometimes to say to a person, a member of Congress, by the way, the program that you think is a good program is not working. But we spend a lot of time doing that in Washington, D.C.

… I'll tell you this, that if government and private sector doesn't continue to work together to make sure people have a skill set, the jobs will go somewhere else. And therefore, now is the time to educate our people. We live in a global economy, and therefore, lawsuits matter.