I like Barack Obama, but I misjudged him. I mistook ambition for courage, and conformity for pragmatism. He needs a visit to the Bunny Planet.
The Bunny Planet appears in a series of books I read to my two-year-old daughter, by Rosemary Wells. After the characters in the series have a miserable day, they're whisked off to see what "should've been."
On the Bunny Planet all is set right, and we come to understand that this alternate reality was "there all along."
What was so awful about Barack Obama's day? In one brief speech he sentenced thousands of people to die for no reason, soldiers and civilians alike.
Say goodbye to Mike from Indiana - gone forever in a midnight ambush. Mourn for Jenny from Mississippi - picked off by a sniper while adjusting her Ipod.
Behold the Afghan mother breast-feeding her newborn - shot down in the shadows after spooking Willie from Arizona. Watch Willie vomit afterward but then decide not to report the casualty. Keep watching Willie as he returns home, suffers night sweats and flashbacks, descends into addiction and then plows into a school bus.
This is not the change anyone voted for. This is not change at all. It's the perennial folly of a species on the brink of self-annihilation.
Obama escalated a war in the name of peace, as many have noted, and in so doing he became a classically deluded Washington insider. His previous economic decisions have been brutal but removed. Now, he has blood all over his hands.
Why? Because in a tragic failure of imagination, he wasn't able to see the speech that should've been. So let us go now, Mr. President, to the Bunny Planet. Let us free our minds and listen.
My fellow Americans, it's time for something completely different. We must move beyond the dangerous and outmoded paradigms of left-right, hawk-dove, and demonstrate in our policy the best of humankind. We must ensure our security at all costs, but we must do so in a way that nurtures rather than destroys.
My advisers all told me this can't be done. But you didn't vote for them, you voted for me, and I won't let you down.
With this sobering duty in mind I announce not thirty thousand pairs of boots on the ground, as has been erroneously reported, but five hundred thousand pairs.
That's right, I'm ordering a surge of five hundred thousand people. But of those five hundred thousand, only a small portion will be soldiers. The rest will be unemployed Americans, under-employed Americans, and anyone else looking for a fresh start in these hard times.
If you want to serve your country and fight terrorism, there's a place for you on our team. We need you to construct schools, hospitals, highways and wind farms. We need you to distribute food and blankets, to serve tea, to hold trembling hands and listen to heartbreaking stories.
This, my fellow Americans, is not your parents' Peace Corps. We mean business. You will earn serious money, and you will spend serious money. You will meet with tribal elders and create development projects together. You will stay until they're complete and train local villagers to supplant you.
Our soldiers will protect you, but it's your sacrifice that will win the day. That's right, I said it - sacrifice. Without that, the status quo in Washington will stop us in our tracks before we can even get started. That's why I need you to sign up tonight, at the end of this speech, for the mission of a lifetime. Our website is waiting for you - sacrifice.gov.
I'm sending our brave, sacrificing citizens not just to Afghanistan but also Pakistan and the Middle East. Where before we have talked democracy and delivered mayhem, now we will speak sparingly and build bridges. There will no longer be a choice between fixing our economy at home and ensuring our safety overseas. This project will produce both results, more quickly and efficiently than any other option.
Still, there are those already asking, "How will we pay for it?" And to them I say, just as health care reform must be deficit neutral, so, too, this initiative. Therefore, I'm asking the congress to pass a 10% tax increase on all Americans making ten million dollars per year or more.
By the calculation of the Office of Management and Budget, this tax increase will create five hundred billion dollars over the next five years, which will pay for everything. And if any fat cats complain about this tax, let alone opposes it, while you're jamming a shovel into stony soil halfway around the world, so help me I'll read their names on TV every single night.
In the wake of this announcement, my fellow citizens, the cable channels will teem with outrage. Lobbyists will blanket Capitol Hill like locusts.
But I fear none of that, I assure you. On my side I have, well, you. If you want a job, you have a job. It's the toughest job you'll ever have, but it will save your house from foreclosing. It will also pay for your health insurance, and maybe even allow you to put away a little for your kid's college.
An honest deal for hardworking Americans? A visionary solution the likes of which no one has seen come out of Washington in generations? I may be tilting at windmills, but I can't really see anyone stopping us.
There are great risks in this program, of course, just as there would be with plain old, unconscionable, sickeningly destructive war. In fact, the voting public may grow impatient for sufficient results and make me a one-term president.
And you know what - that would be okay. I'd rather go down fighting for you, your families, and hard working families all over the world, than sell you down a river of wasted blood.
The Bunny Planet has been there all along, Mr. President. It still is.
