Purveyors of False Populism in our Hemisphere

This was without question the best sound bite dropped by President G.W. Bush last night where he took a jab at Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, urging Congress to pass a trade agreement with Colombia or risk emboldening “the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere.”

Apparently his speech writer(s) are looking to polish up their resume portfolios with phrases that less than 20% of the US population can comprehend. For those of you who are still wondering, “populism” according to Princeton’s WorldNet lexical database for the English language is “the political doctrine that supports the rights and powers of the common people in their struggle with the privileged elite”.

So, I guess what he was trying to say was that Congress should pass a trade agreement that will supposedly stop Central and South America’s “privileged elite” from lying about how poorly they are treating the common people in their countries. Something tells me that won’t happen.

And here is the other sound bite that had me scratching my head…

“Al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq and there is no doubt that this enemy will be defeated”. The thing he failed to mention was that they have setup shop in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria, Turkey and Canada and are continuing to recruit heavily as they grow stronger while devising scheme that they hope will bring the U.S. and our allies to their knees.

Maybe it is time for the general population to start using Google Earth to track Al Qaeda activity, rather than continuing to allow them to track us. This might at least give us all some perspective on how prevalent (and scary) the situation with these extremists really is.