People at the airport I departed yesterday like to say, “Austin to Boston” with a little ring to it. The female attendant at the JetBlue counter did it, followed by a woman at an all-UT store where pretty much everything they sold was burnt orange with white longhorns. A post 6th Street post was in the works, but I’ll just summarize: When in Austin, go to the Broken Spoke and have the chicken fried steak for dinner so you’ll be impervious to alcohol and can stay out late and see lots of bands and other um, sights.

Long after this blog is in digital dormancy and I’m dead, “Dubya” will be in the history books as the worst president in the history of the republic. His remarks this week about “appeasement” shine a light on a subject he should have left off, like the dim 40 watter barely blinking in his head. Actually, he just plays a dumb puppet sitting on the lap of corporate ventriloquists, and his crimes of appeasement are far worse than the well intentioned classic blunder of Neville Chamberlain. For those of you playing at home, as British Prime Minister, Chamberlain led one of several countries, including France and Italy who signed the Munich Agreement, ceding a part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in an effort to halt his European expansion efforts. It failed as Hitler said, “danke” and kept the Nazi Panzers rolling all the way to Paris.

Appeasement. In my mind, George Bush was implicating Barack Obama as an “appeaser” of Iran with his comments in the Israeli Knesset. Simply talking to a party with goals counter to our own is not appeasement. It is the giving away of something that defines the term. For example:

  • No national health insurance plan appeases drug companies and health insurance providers at the expense of, in some cases, the lives of uninsured Americans.
  • A pathetic record on CAFÉ auto emission standards appeases both the US automakers and the oil companies at the expense of American families and the environment.
  • Lack of regulation and oversight appeases a greedy financial industry at the expense of thousands of American families losing their homes.
  • Finally, the crowing achievement of this dreadful administration appeases the likes of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton Corporation with no-bid contracts at the expense of over 4,000 American lives, thousands more Iraqis, lower standing in the world, and billions of wasted dollars.

An honest mistake is Neville Chamberlain’s legacy. The inexcusable weakening of our nation by appeasing his corporate friends is the legacy of George W. Bush.