GOOD OLD BUSH, HELPING IMPROVE, NOT RUN, PEOPLE'S LIVES

"Government should help people improve their lives, not run their lives," George W. Bush stated in his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night.

Improve their lives? How does his order cutting overtime pay for workers fit in with this philosophy? What about soaring health care and college tuition costs; declining incomes for the middle and lower classes; horrific increases in the number of Americans, especially children, living in poverty; administration attempts (not over by a long shot!) to privatize (read: destroy) Social Security and eliminate Medicare and the rest of the social safety net; Bush-sponsored rollbacks in our environmental standards; a nation living in a constant state of fear and uncertainty, a condition largely nurtured by those who govern us?

Not run their lives? What other administration in recent memory has so fervently and evangelically attempted to inject its own religious values into the lives of all Americans by sponsoring initiatives to block the legitimization of intimate human relationships, to sponsor a specific religion (Christianity), to tell us how to raise our children, to negate the decades-old established right of women to control their own bodies?

In Bush's world, up is down and truth is lies. These people have no shame.