Thursday, February 19, 2004
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I’m on a roller coaster! First you said you were going to create 2.6 million jobs this year, but now you say you’re “not a statistician” and you’re “not in charge of the numbers.” Oh well, I can relate. I’m not a good numbers person either. Numbers don’t matter--people matter! So what if you’ve lost 2.8 million jobs since 2001? It’s just a number.
Remember when you said, "Forty workers here, five workers there, uh-h-h... begin to add up.” I’m not a statistician, but forty workers here and five workers there adds up to forty five workers. Good start! You only have 2,599,955 workers to go!
Everybody’s whining about the 5 billion dollar deficit. How many of them even know what 5 billion dollars is? I sure can’t count that high! That’s probably why you didn’t add the 5 billion dollar cost of the Iraq war into the budget--too high to count. I’m not sure, but I think this is what 10 billion looks like:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
I know you’re not a numbers person, but how many Americans have died in Iraq now? I know it’s well over 500 (five hundred). How many do you think will die before the election? As long as it’s less than 2.6 million, we’re probably ok. I heard over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died (a hundred thousand). Collateral damage.
The most important number is 150 million. I know you know that number! That’s how much money you’ll have to spend on TV ads so everybody will know that John Kerry is a flip-flopping Massachussets liberal who, when he wasn’t sitting three rows in back of Jane Fonda at a Grateful Dead concert was shaking hands with Michael Dukakis and voting to turn over our country to the Russians or the terrorists or whoever else wanted it! Actually, I think you’ll have more than 150 million to spend, but who’s counting? (150,000,000)
By the way, how was dinner with your buddies at Bern’s Steakhouse after the Daytona 500 (five-hundred)? I heard you had a $60 (sixty dollar) steak and $92 (ninety-two dollar) caviar and a $10,000 (ten thousand dollar) bottle of wine. And I thought the Democrats were big spenders! I guess if you were in charge of the numbers, you might have eaten somewhere cheaper.
256 (two-hundred fifty-six) days til elections!
Carl Estrada