Ok, I’ll admit: I couldn’t resist. I got this in an email this morning. Was supposedly written by a “Maineiac” — a resident of the People’s Republic of Maine. Regardless of who wrote it, it’s funny! Enjoy

George W. Bush’s Resignation Speech

Normally, I start these things out by saying ‘My Fellow Americans.’ Not doing it this time. If the polls are any indication, I don’t know who more than half of you are anymore. I do know something terrible has happened, and that you’re really not fellow Americans any longer.

I’ll cut right to the chase here: I quit. Now before anyone gets all in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, or to avoid prosecution or something, let me assure you: There’s been no breaking of laws or impeachable offenses in this office.

The reason I’m quitting is simple. I’m fed up with you people. I’m fed up because you have no understanding of what’s really going on in the world. Or of what’s going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damned lazy to do your homework and figure it out.

Let’s start local. You’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians and the news media. Polls show that the majority of you think the economy is in the tank. And that’s despite record numbers of homeowners, including record numbers of MINORITY homeowners. And while we’re mentioning minorities, I’ll point out that minority business ownership is at an all-time high. Our unemployment rate is as low as it ever was during the Clinton administration. I’ve mentioned all those things before, but it doesn’t seem to have sunk in.

Despite the shock to our economy of 9/11, the stock market has rebounded to record levels and more Americans than ever are participating in these markets. Meanwhile, gas prices are too damn high because a small handful of noisy idiots, democrats who whine, are more worried about polar bears and beachfront property than your economic security.

We face real threats in the world. Don’t give me this ‘blood for oil’ thing. If I were trading blood for oil I would’ve already seized Iraq’s oil fields. And don’t give me this ‘Bush Lied; People Died’ crap either. If I were the liar you morons make me out to be, I could’ve easily had chemical weapons planted in Iraq so they could be ‘discovered.’ Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty.

Let me remind you that the rest of the world thought Saddam had the goods, same as me. Let me also remind you that regime change in Iraq was official US policy before I came into office. Some guy named ‘Clinton’ established that policy. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? Now some of you morons are considering another and more evil Clinton for president !!!! Go figure that one!! She wants to take your kids away and let the ‘whole village’ raise them! Can you say ‘governmental indoctrination’ … Look this one up you dumb asses!

The rest of you morons want to be led by a junior senator, or worse, OSAMA, who has no understanding of foreign policy or economics–I mean this nitwit says we should attack Pakistan, a nuclear ally! And then he wants to go to Iran and make peace with a terrorist who says he’s going to destroy us. While he’s doing that, he wants to give Iraq to al Qaeda, Afghanistan to the Taliban, Israel to the Palestinians, and your money to the IRS so the government can give welfare to illegal aliens, who he will make into citizens, so they can vote to reelect him. He also thinks it’s okay for Iran to have nuclear weapons, and we should stop our foreign aid to Israel. Did you sleep through high school?

You idiots need to understand that we face a unique enemy. Back during the cold war, there were two major competing political and economic models squaring off. We won that war, but we did so because fundamentally, the Communists wanted to survive, just as we do. We were simply able to out spend and out-tech them.

That’s not the case this time. The soldiers of our new enemy don’t care if they survive. In fact, they want to die. That’d be fine, as long as they weren’t also committed to taking as many of you with them as they can. But they are. They want to kill you, and the bastards are all over the globe.

You should be grateful that they haven’t gotten any more of us here in the United States since September 11. But you’re not. That’s because you’ve got no idea how hard a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that. When this whole mess started, I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight. I’m disappointed how many of you people think a long and difficult fight amounts to a single season of ‘Survivor.’

Instead, you’ve grown impatient. You’re incapable of seeing things through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do. You think that wars should last a few months, a few years, tops.

Making matters worse, you actively support those who help the enemy. Every time you buy the New York Times, every time you send a donation to a cut-and-run Democrat’s political campaign, well, dang it, you might just as well FedEx a grenade launcher to a Jihadist. It amounts to the same thing.

In this day and age, it’s easy enough to find the truth. It’s all over the Internet. It just isn’t on the pages of the New York Times, USA Today, or on NBC News. But even if it were, I doubt you’d be any smarter. Most of you would rather watch American Idol or Dancing with Stars.

I could say more about your expectations that the government will always be there to bail you out, even if you’re too stupid to leave a city that’s below sea level and has a hurricane approaching.

I could say more about your insane belief that government, not your own wallet, is where the money comes from. But I’ve come to the conclusion that if I did, it would sail right over your heads.

So I quit. I’m going back to Crawford. I’ve got an energy-efficient house down there (Al Gore could only dream) and the capability to be fully self-sufficient for years. No one ever heard of Crawford before I got elected, and as soon as I’m done here pretty much no one will ever hear of it again. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to die of old age before the last pillars of America fall.

Oh, and by the way, Cheney’s quitting too. That means Pelosi is your new President. You asked for it.

Watch what she does carefully, because I still have a glimmer of hope that there are just enough of you remaining who are smart enough to turn this thing around in 2008.

So that’s it. God bless what’s left of America.

Some of you know what I mean. The rest of you, kiss off.

PS - You might want to start learning Farsi, and buy a Koran.

I was thumbing through my Google Reader this morning, trying to sort through the stuff I’m terribly behind on reading. I’m behind on everything at the moment, it seems. So I was looking through the entries for TED (”TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.”)

So I see this entry for “Stroke of Insight: Jill Bolte Taylor “, a neuroanatomist — she studies and maps the brain and its functions. Here’s an excerpt from the TED page:

One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness …

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the “Singin’ Scientist.”

Watch how a scientist describes what happened to herself. If you’re not intrigued by what she has to say and the enormous possibility it implies, then IMHO you ought to check your pulse…

My father passed away this evening, February 15, 2008 at home, with my mother, brother, and a sister at his side.

My dad didn’t achieve great things; and, like all of us, he made plenty of mistakes. But whatever he did or didn’t do in life, I was proud of him. Many years ago, he quit what was to him a boring job as a draftsman to follow his dream of being a professional pilot. Almost 40 years later, his flying career ended when he couldn’t pass the level of flight physical he needed. His last flight job was flying Lear jets for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I don’t think it could be termed ‘wanderlust’, but even after he was forced from flying, he couldn’t sit still. He trained for and took a job driving long-haul trucks — but not just any. He had to pick the ones that other drivers weren’t comfortable with: the triples, tankers, dangerous cargoes.

I didn’t get to see him as much as I wanted these last few years; it always seemed like our paths were going different directions, and for one reason or another, just didn’t intersect. Miles, money, time — it was always something. I regret now not making more of an effort.

Robert Eugene Johnson
April 2, 1933 — February 15, 2008

Dad, I love you. I will miss you.

Godspeed.