And may God help us all ...

NYT headline: In A Quiet Vacation, the President Readies for an Ambitious Agenda.

According to Stephen Hadley the regime has "listened to our critics and are already pursuing many of their proposals" which would be more reassuring if Bush's weekly radio address had not included delusions like this:

• after the Dec. 15 Iraqi election, whose results are still in flux, the country was on its way to "an inclusive, unified and lasting democracy."

The truth is, we've replaced a secular government with a theocracy of religious extremists who hate our guts. Way to go, there. You can almost smell the crude oil they want to give us for all our good deeds, can't you?

• On the economic front he insisted that, even with tax cuts, his government was "staying on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009," but he made no mention of the fact that his Treasury secretary, John W. Snow, asked Congress on Thursday to raise the debt limit again, the fourth time in Mr. Bush's presidency, so that the government can borrow more money, largely for increases in military and entitlement programs.

Speaking on a strictly personal level here, as I try my damnedest to stay afloat as a member of the lower middle class (but find myself sinking steadily under a rising tide of increased prices without anything extra coming in), I would not trust these people to oversee a piggy bank. & what they're doing to our economy should be considered as criminal, in its own way, as their war crimes against Iraq.

But hey, at least there isn't anything about eviscerating Social Security on his current agenda ...