corrente

Bush gave a speech dedicating the new Lincoln Museum today.

Whoa. Just a minute, here.

Sorry, I'm feeling a little bit queasy. Where's that damn bucket?

[pause]

OK. Now I feel better. And Bush had this to say:

"Citizens enlisted Lincoln's principles in the fight to bring the vote to women and to end Jim Crow laws. When Martin Luther King Jr. called the nation to redeem the promissory note of the Declaration [of Independence], he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial -- and Lincoln was behind him in more ways than one," Bush said. "From the lunch counter to the schoolhouse door to the Army barracks, President Lincoln has continued to hold this nation to its promises."
(via WaPo)

Funny, isn't it?

When Bush wants to grab a two-fer by co-opting the name of a great President, and black American's struggle for freedom, he uses "promissory note"—as a metaphor for "holding the nation to its promises."

So how about promissory notes that aren't metaphors, but real?

The "promise," good for 70 years until Bush came along, that when we pay our payroll taxes, we get to retire in dignity?

That promise, and those promissory notes, are no metaphors.

But when Bush encounters a real promissory note, to him it's nothing but a pile of IOUs.

Why is that?