Won't somebody please think of the children?

Let's review the week that was, shall we?

Last Tuesday, GW Bush promised to break our addiction to foreign oil, "which is often imported from unstable parts of the world." He'd cut imports from the Middle East by 75 percent over the next twenty years.

He also lauded his "plan" to cut the deficit, expected to be around $360 billion dollars this year, in half by 2009. The plan doesn't include spending for Iraq, Afghanistan or hurricane reconstruction, but does rest on the assumption that his "temporary" tax cuts will be allowed to expire as planned.

Then he called on Congress to make them permanent, saying the cuts had "left 880 billion dollars in the hands of American workers, investors, small businesses, and families," by which he meant the highest earning executives, investors, big multinationals and really rich families like the Bushes.On Wedneday, in an attempt to address the budget deficit, House Republicans won a narrow victory on a package of $39 billion in spending cuts over the next five years, which, according to Reuters, capped "a yearlong push to cut health care for the poor and elderly and other programs."

When asked that same day about our spankin' new plan for energy independence, Saudi ambassador Turki al-Faisal told the New York Times that he would have to ask Bush's office "what he exactly meant by that." "I see no threat from America from receiving its oil from the Middle East," he added.

The administration was quick to calm his fears: there would, indeed, be no threat "from America" on the energy-cutting front. "This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said. After all, as Knight-Ridder pointed out, "in 2025, net petroleum imports … are expected to account for 60 percent of demand … up from 58 percent in 2004," according to the administration's own 2006 Annual Energy Outlook.

Then Thursday came around. Bush requested a 5 percent increase in the military budget, bringing it to $439 billion dollars -- nearly equal to the rest of the world's expenditures. Most of the increase is in hardware: new ships, planes and R&D on the next generation of deadly toys. The budget doesn't include, of course, Department of Energy funds for maintaining the nuclear arsenal, nor does it include the soon-to-be-realized increases in veterans' benefits as our battered troops return home from the War on Terrrr.

On the same day, the administration announced that it would request $138 billion dollars for war-fighting and hurricane relief. This is money that isn't in any budget -- it's a "supplemental." Because, you know, nobody could have predicted we'd be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan all the way back in February of 2005, when the request was made.

Also on Thursday, the Senate went ahead and passed a new tax cut package worth $70 billion dollars. Some of the cuts were good, but, according to USA Today, "Republicans expect the final version of the bill to extend tax cuts for capital gains and dividends" -- for the wealthiest. They'll more than wash those cuts in spending for "healthcare for the poor and elderly" passed in the House the day before.

Nutty priorities? Get used to it. On Friday, Bush's Defense Department announced its "quadrennial review," which calls for a "long war" against "extremism" lasting twenty years or more. But it doesn't say anything about paying for it with cuts to programs geared towards conventional war, even though we face no conventional threat.

Got all that? We need to break our addiction to foreign oil, but we won't because it'll piss off the Bush family's friends in Saudi Arabia, the country that spawned most of the desert-dwelling thugs who we'll battle in a long, non-war with our shiny new ships! In order to compensate the wealthiest Americans for their non-sacrifice in not sending their kids to die in our long non-war, we'll have to keep pumping out tax breaks. We'll pay for all of this with spending cuts in social services for the poor and the elderly, and with budget deficits as far as the eye can see, meaning that our kids will be burdened with a huge national debt, on which the interest alone will take a giant chunk out of future budgets even as the baby boomers suck up all that entitlement spending in their Golden Years.