The Power of God

Last night I had a crazy dream. In it, President Bush publicly bitchslapped Phillip Cooney and other administration officials who had been lying about the dangers of global warming. The President cited the same dozen “doctored, distorted or suppressed” reports to which Robert Kennedy Jr. has referred in the Huffington Post and elsewhere. In my dream, Mr. Bush explained that he had been talking to God and then, weeping like Jimmy Swaggart caught with a whore, he said that God had reminded him that lying was a sin, and that He would not longer tolerate it in his administration.

Good dream, right? Well, it got better…

While the President was chatting with God, He dictated to the President a new energy policy. No longer would the US rely on its military might to secure energy at the cost of billions of wasted dollars and thousands of precious lives. From now on, the nation’s primary source of energy would be the “Power of God!” In a spasm of evangelical fervor, Bush went on to instruct every Christian with a south facing rooftop to install solar panels. Thus outfitted, the President claimed, good Christian homes would provide 70% of the nation’s electrical power needs. He called this his Faith Based Energy Initiative. Then he announced ambitious plans to capture the power of the mighty wind, the burning sun, and the mysterious tides. He said that -- unlike oil, which must be “stolen from the ground” -- these renewable sources come “straight from our heavenly Father!”

Pounding on a purple White House pulpit and wearing a belly dancer’s billowing pants (this was a dream) Mr. Bush sang a song about the fact that it took less than twenty years for the personal computer to become ubiquitous and how adopting renewables as the primary energy source is “a much less strenuous job!” I believe he rhymed “much less strenuous job” with “Karl Rove is a disingenuous slob.”

My dream was bouncing along happily as administration lies about other areas of policy were admitted, repented, and the damage done reversed, when it took a weird and frankly unpleasant turn: Laura Bush appeared in a diaphanous gown and proceeded to narrate a ballet sequence choreographed to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” In the ballet President Bush repeatedly attempted to milk a male horse.

Which is, I guess, what we're doing when we dream things will get better with this President. We’re just milking a male horse.