Dear President Bush,

Thank you for another rare press conference last Thursday night. While it’s always important for the President of the United States to feign interest in his constituents, the added bonus of knocking Joey, The O.C., and Jennifer Wilbanks from primetime television – if only for an hour – brought a smile to my face.

Was I surprised that you came to us once again with doomsday scenarios and economic revelations that were likely borne on the back of an Arby’s napkin by a drunken crayon? Hardly! I not only expect them, I encourage them.

And you certainly didn’t disappoint; not content to merely frighten the people with vague and dire warnings of the collapsing Social Security system, you’ve also managed to proclaim that the salvation of the economy rests entirely on – ready for this? – lowering gas prices.

“I am concerned about the economy because our small business owners and families are paying higher prices at the gas pump,” you said the other night. Your solution? “In the near-term, we will continue to encourage oil producing nations to maximize their production. Here at home, we’ll protect consumers. There will be no price gouging at gas pumps in America.”

If that’s the case, how is it Occidental, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell and Unocal are all reporting record net profits since fuel prices have risen above $3.00 a gallon stateside? These profits aren’t tied to the rising cost of purchasing and transporting the oil around the world, otherwise they’d be a part of ordinary operating costs. If all of these companies are smarting from the rising cost of crude around the globe, how else are they able to enjoy such financial rewards? By using this “crisis” to hit people at the pump.

A crisis that has come from several factors. First and foremost, the dollar continues to slide as a unit of purchasing power. It takes more US dollars to buy oil abroad because it’s worth less on the currency exchange. Why? Well, it may primarily be because we no longer produce anything anyone wants to buy (thanks to trade agreements you support like CAFTA – “it’ll help strengthen the neighborhood,” remember?), but I like to think our foreign policy of unilateral aggression and intolerance helped play a role in that, too. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is so fed up with your administration’s posturing that he’s threatened to cut all crude exports to the United States.

That would seem to put a crimp in your plan to encourage production upgrades, Mr. President. The realization, however, that many foreign nations are already operating at near-maximum efficiency is far worse. There’s potentially a finite amount of oil in the Middle East, and the Saudis and Iranians are facing that inevitable down slope of output. If this is the case, your near-term goals are useless. There’s not enough oil to meet demand, period. As for protecting consumers? Please, George, don’t make me blush.

Do you truly think an amorphous energy bill will start to solve a problem of petroleum dependency we’ve had for decades? Yes, funding technology that bypasses that need is wise and necessary, except such funding never leads anywhere.

There are already self-sustaining power plants that take refuse and biomass and convert it to usable base elements and petroleum. This technology exists here in the United States today. Why not spend the $85 billion you’ve allocated towards blowing up Iraqis in the name of freedom on mass-producing these plants? They cut down on waste, produce a necessity and make the nation a cleaner place to be.

Better yet, repeal ridiculous laws prohibiting nuclear waste refinement. We could drastically reduce our stockpile of nuclear waste just by refining radioactive elements and pressing them back into service. Is there a potential for weapons-grade materials from the process? Absolutely – but since you’re looking to build up our nuclear arsenal some more, everybody wins.

You say people are “balking at doing hard work?” The people are busting their asses, Mr. President. It’s up to you to look past your self-serving oil interests and recognize those possibilities.

Your statement about how this bill would, had it been ratified ten years ago, solve all of our problems sums up your position on energy reform quite nicely. If you’d truly cared, the bill would have been on your desk in 2001 as one of your incoming goals. It wasn’t. Don’t try to blame the Clinton era for shortcomings you yourself were unwilling to overcome.

As for Social Security, Mr. President, I’ve mentioned your plan before. I think it’s a bad idea, and your thoughts the other night did little to sway my opinion. However, your proposals planted the germ in my mind I think you want every American thinking – why do I need Social Security?

With 401(k) programs having supplanted the security of a pension, it was only a matter of time before Social Security took a government-sponsored hit. Now you’re saying that the private Wall Street-backed plan is entirely voluntary, and that if we want to stay in the old plan it’s at our discretion. Great. So if I can choose that I want my money to go into the shake n’ bake Bizarro world of the stock market, why can’t I elect to forgo Social Security altogether?

Aye, there’s the rub, sir. In your own words last week, “you pay into the system through your payroll taxes, and the government spends it. It spends the money on the current retirees, and with the money left over, it funds other government programs. And all that’s left behind is file cabinets full of IOUs.” In other words, you want to give us the illusion we have control over our money and our destiny, but the government still wants to hold onto that cash and spend it like crazy on foreign wars, empire-building and illegal kickbacks.

The entire insolvency issue of Social Security would not be an issue if the federal government hadn’t seen fit to steal from it like a child steals from penny jar. Bit by bit the fund has been eroded to pay for pet projects, cut taxes and balance the budget. Former Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings said as such in 1998:

“What we’ve been doing, Mr. Chairman [Alan Greenspan], in all reality, is taken a hundred billion out of the Social Security Trust Fund, transferring it over to the spending column, and spending it. Our friends to the left here are getting their tax cuts, we’re getting our spending increases, and hollering surplus, surplus, and balanced budget, and balanced budget plans when we continue to spend a hundred billion more than we take in.”

So you’re absolutely right, Mr. President. The cupboard is bare, filled only with empty promises of solvency. Changing how the incoming Social Security money is managed from here on out doesn’t help replace the hundreds of billions casually spent on everything it was not meant for. I understand you didn’t start the problem, but your continued overspending doesn’t help.

That may be why there’s a $330 billion discrepancy in income tax revenues. See, the people you piss off and lie to over No Child Left Behind (from active military recruitment, you mean), troop armament, weapons of mass destruction and infrastructure are simply tired of giving the government money and watching it go straight down the tube. The states are broke, the roads and schools are under funded, but foreign countries get our billions and the destruction of the Middle East continues unabated. People don’t like to pay for illegal wars, George. They don’t like you. And they elect not to pay for your high crimes and misdemeanors.

You say you want to listen to the people and be responsive to them yet balk at polls suggesting Americans are sick of being in Iraq, or that your Social Security doomsday scenarios are ineffective. Lord knows you didn’t care that people overwhelming disagreed with your stance on Terry Schiavo.

So little by little the people are making their move against you. They fight your plans for Social “reform,” they refuse to pay taxes (considering the IRS and the government can’t even provide proof a federal income tax is constitutional, I’d hardly call this civil disobedience), they ignore your hollow words on the looming energy crisis.

You’re losing steam with every false promise about Iraq and its burgeoning democracy. Your talking points are barely making it past your tongue.

Best of all, you might be starting to realize it.

I’ll stop now, because the person reading this to you might be getting tired. But as a friend once said, “You’re a simple man. A predictable man that goes through a series of mechanisms that he believes are complex and interesting. You hold no truth other than the ones you’ve twisted in your own mind to justify your unsophisticated actions hidden behind two dollar words.”

Have a good night, Mr. President. God bless America.