By Jeffrey Sparshott
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
President Bush will decide "in a reasonable period of time" whether tariffs to help the steel industry have worked and should be lifted. "I'm in the process of reviewing the ... extent to which the industry has been restructured," he said yesterday at the White House. A WTO decision Monday allowed the 15-nation European Union … to retaliate against billions of dollars in U.S.-made exports. …With the WTO decision the economic and political stakes have increased. Where the steel tariffs were designed to boost political support in key election states, the retaliation is targeted to hit back at equally important voter bases such as Florida, a big citrus producer, and the Carolinas, a major textile center.
Flatbush Showalter is a Deputy Assistant Special Assistant to the Acting Under Deputy of Amelioration Affairs in the Office of United States Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. He is also a voracious consumer of Cosmopolitans and Appletinis at the Pinky Ring, a K Street bar popular with Administration Officials and lobbyists. Approached there during yesterday's "Two for One Margarita night", he provided the following comments on the tariff issue. Any assertion on his part that he was "off the record" should be taken - just like his many margaritas - with a grain of salt.
Oh, Sweet Jesus that tastes good.... just because POTUS can't have any doesn't mean the rest of us can't, right? Hey, English Major - another round for me and my furry friend... so where were we? Oh, yeah. Tariffs.
Screw the WTO. Screw them and their Effing lawyers. One-hundred and twenty-eight pages. Full of crap like "Article 4.2(c) is an elaboration of Article 3; moreover 'unforeseen developments' under Article XIX:1(a) of the GATT 1994 is one of the 'pertinent issues of fact and law' to which the last sentence of Article 3.1 refers." Crap. How the Hell am I supposed to explain that to the Big Guy? The man thinks in clichés for God's sake - he understands "evildoers" but he's never going to get this. There are Harvard law graduates who don't understand the WTO system.
Well, it's not like he cared that much anyway. Rove pitched it as a sop to the steel industry, and once the President heard "industry" you could see his ears perk up like a dog hearing its master at the front door. We just have to frame lifting the tariffs as some Hollywood cliché - Forrest Gump breaking out of his crutches maybe. Yeah, maybe. POTUS liked that one, even if he didn't get it. Heck, there are professors of semiotics who didn't get Forrest Gump. What the hell was the feather about, anyway?
I should get back soon. I'm supposed to be at Bible Study right now. Don't worry, I'm not going Holy Roller on you. Mostly we just sit around and talk about sports. Shit, if those people knew Ephesians the way they know the Redskins defensive line, they could all be ministers. But not a lot of real deep theology going on there -we leave that to the Papists. Big Guy isn't a real fan of words like "Antinomianism," and based on that glazed stare I'd say he was lost by the whole "Infralapsarianism vs. Supralapsarianism" debate last week. Tonight he just kept saying "So, does Jesus want me to lift the tariffs or not?"
Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product.
The rest is the fakey part.
Home Previous Lines of the Day
