Last night President 40%-Approval-Rating-and-Sinking-Fast gave an excellent speech about the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the federal rebuilding efforts. Wait, did I type “excellent”? Sorry, my mind was in a time warp and I thought he was giving the speech two weeks ago. I meant “excrement”, of the bovine variety.

But actually, I had to love it, because all throughout I heard the giant sucking sound of fiscal conservatives and states’ rights conservatives all gasping at once. It’s a beautiful thing, because you know people like me have been hating on him for five years and the only thing he could say to get applause from us is “I resign”. Now we get to sit back and watch as the other side slowly come to their senses and realize that he’s not the conservative they’d like him to be, either.

Thanks to the magic of “Radical” Russ patented Mind-Reader Technology with enhanced Read-Between-the-Lines Accuracy, I’m proud to present these excerpts from his speech, with the parts you didn’t hear on CNN:

We have also witnessed the kind of desperation no citizen of this great and generous nation should ever have to know — fellow Americans calling out for food and water, vulnerable people left at the mercy of criminals who had no mercy and the bodies of the dead lying uncovered and untended in the street. Of course by “we”, I mean “you”; I was watching Mark Wills try to teach me a “G” chord.

All major gasoline pipelines are now in operation, preventing the supply disruptions that many of my friends with with stock in the oil industry feared. The breaks in the levees have been closed, the pumps are running, and the water here in New Orleans is receding by the hour.

Environmental officials are on the ground, taking water samples, identifying and dealing with hazardous debris, and working to get drinking water and waste water treatment systems operating again. And you can be assured that when we say the water is clean, it’s clean, even if we’re not reading any benzene in an area full of oil and gas refineries that has been flooded. After all, these EPA professionals are the same fellas that told you the air was clean at Ground Zero two weeks after 9/11. You can trust ’em!

And some very sad duties are being carried out by professionals who gather the dead, treat them with respect, and prepare them for their rest, and make sure to keep photographers away and resist all efforts at an accurate body count.

Federal funds will cover the great majority of the costs of repairing public infrastructure in the disaster zone — from roads and bridges to schools and water systems. Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of money to spend on rebuilding New Orleans and Iraq, as well as keep tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans and kill the Estate Tax, so sweet little Paris Hilton can keep all her money. You may not know this, but at the federal level, we have printing presses that can just create money! Our goal is to get the work done quickly. And taxpayers expect this work to be done honestly and wisely, so we will have a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures, you know, like the auditors in Iraq who managed to just make $8.8 billion disappear.

[W]hen communities are rebuilt, they must be even better, richer, whiter, and stronger than before the storm. Within the Gulf region are some of the most beautiful and historic places in America, which will be so much more enjoyable to visit without all the poor black folks spoiling the experience.

As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well, and whoo-boy, nobody wants to have to look at that. And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action, like scrubbing black voters off of voter rolls, so they won’t do something stupid like elect a Democrat who’d just do them wrong, heh heh heh.

Tonight I propose the creation of a Gulf Opportunity For Halliburton, Bechtel, and Other Buddies of Mine to Further Loot the Federal Treasury Zone, encompassing the region of the disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama. Within this zone, we should provide immediate incentives for jobs-that-pay-lower-than-the-prevailing-wage-creating investment: tax relief for small businesses (because who really needs tax revenue? remember, we can just print money!), incentives to companies that create jobs without having to conform to any affirmative-action guidelines, and loans and loan guarantees for small businesses, including minority-owned enterprises because we don’t care what color your skin is as long as you’ve got the green, to get them up and running again.

Protecting a city that sits lower than the water around it is not easy, but it can and has been done. Sure, not by us, and not lately, but Condi told me that the Netherlands is below sea level and well-protected, and gol-durn it, if Netherlandanians can do it, then Americans can do it better! City and parish officials in New Orleans, and state officials in Louisiana will have a large part in the engineering decisions to come, so if it doesn’t go well, I’ll have some handy Democrats to blame. And the Army Corps of Engineers will work at their side to make the flood protection system stronger than it has ever been. We might even adequately fund them this time, because, you know, we can print money!

It is the armies of compassion, charities and houses of worship and idealistic men and women that give our reconstruction effort its humanity. They offer to those who hurt a friendly face, an arm around the shoulder, and the reassurance that in hard times, they can count on someone who cares. Especially those houses of worship. They definitely need as much of that newly-printed money we can shovel at them, because they have the good sense to support me and my initiatives to ban the homo marriages, the abortions, the stem-cell research, and support putting the Ten Commandments, creationism, and prayer in our public schools.

The government of this nation will do its part as well. Our cities must have clear and up-to-date plans for responding to natural disasters, disease outbreaks or terrorist attack — for evacuating large numbers of people in an emergency and for providing the food, water and security they would need. You know, planning for a major urban disaster was something I really intended to get around to in October of 2001, but me and Karl were trying to figure out how to convince everyone that Saddam Hussein was the biggest threat our cities faced and how to get people to put their Social Security in the hands of Wall Street. But trust us; in the four years after 9/11, we’ve made considerable progress on generating some momentum on beginning to address the possibility of focusing on our urban defense strategery.

I also want to know all the facts about the government response to Hurricane Katrina. The storm involved a massive flood, a major supply and security operation and an evacuation order affecting more than a million people. I also heard that black people were looting and shooting and raping each other and didn’t have the sense to evacuate when they were told.

The United States Congress also has an important oversight function to perform. Congress is preparing an investigation like the one they prepared for Iran-Contra in 1987, where the panel’s membership is made up of more Republicans than Democrats, and I will work with members of both parties to make sure this effort is thorough, just like I was so eager to have a bipartisan, independent investigation of 9/11… well, after the 9/11 widows shamed me into it.

Thank you, and may God bless America, and no place else.