Bush a master of metaphor, truth

I like to be on top of things. I enjoy being relevant and topical – you know, like Murphy… I like to be on top of things. I enjoy being relevant and topical – you know, like Murphy Brown. And while I don’t like to talk about my shortcomings – because, let’s face it, I have so few – it took me a couple of weeks to figure this one out. Every year the president of our country has to give this State of the Union speech that discusses the state of our civil union. It’s generally a somber, serious affair that revisits the course our country has taken over the last year and lays out the path we will take to the future. This year our president said something that unlocked his entire policy-making strategy to me. It finally made sense.

President Bush said to the nation that he will reduce the United States’ dependence on Middle Eastern oil 75 percent by the year 2025. After the speech, the Secretary of Energy was asked by Knight Ridder about the specifics of such an important plan. He responded that 75 percent and 2025 weren’t meant to be taken literally but were “purely an example.” Normally, such specific usage of numbers would indicate a certain degree of literalness, but this president refuses to allow his syntactic sovereignty to be undermined by the likes of Standard-Practices-When-Delivering-the-State-of-the-Union-istan.

By revealing the correct interpretation of the president’s words, the secretary revealed the strategy that has been employed from the beginning: the random and surreptitious insertion of metaphors and other obfuscating linguistic devices into policy speech for historians to enjoy later. This insight is the compass with which I can now properly navigate the twisty straits of things the president has said. I mean, before he blurted that state secret I was stuck in the same confusing muck as you rubes.

The first furtive peppering of metaphor debuted in his inauguration. His oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” to the “best of his ability” couldn’t have been meant literally. He clearly isn’t trying to defend the separation of church and state when he sends his college-dropout campaign volunteer, George Deutsch, to tell NASA doctorates to cleanse their scientific research with holy water. I mean, under his protection we’ve suffered an attack on our homeland. And his tax-cutting while mired in war hasn’t done much to preserve the Constitution or the country. So I think he must have been using “the Constitution of the United Sates” metaphorically to mean “my rich friends and their continued dominance.”

More recently, in the aftermath of Katrina, Bush said that he “will do what it takes” to rebuild and restore the great city. But six short months later the mayor has had to court foreign leaders in the hopes that they can fill the shortages in aid from our government. I now know that “what it takes” was merely an expression used to politely indicate that the president is not quite sure what poor people eat but they should rest assured, Ramen is on him.

I put the pieces together from the other perplexing passage in this year’s State of the Union Address. I am referring to when the president officially declared his opposition to “creating human-animal hybrids.” I feel compelled to reiterate that he discussed human-animal hybrids in his official capacity as president in front of a room full of elected officials and video cameras.

I know now that his explicit stance against these abominable hybrids wasn’t proof of his declining mental health brought on by injurious levels of substances abuse as a young man of 40. It was actually an executive idiom for “Karl bet me that the American public is so cowed, docile and unaware that I could say the craziest thing I can think of during my most important annual speech and as long as it is said with a straight face, people will swallow it whole and then wait for seconds.” Although, in this I could be wrong. He could have been completely serious. It is possible that the president is literally worried about centaurs. Those damn centaurs.

Dick Cheney’s gangsta moment was not a metaphor, it was a warning. E-mail arunbutcher@yahoo.com.