Selected excerpts from Bush’s November 8 speech in Atlanta, including portions of the original draft (in red italics) that didn’t make the final cut.

Tonight, many thousands of children are tragically learning to live without one of their parents.
Soon it will be tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and then perhaps millions of children who will be learning to live without one or both of their parents. But that’s only if we count the Afghani kids.

And the rest of us are learning to live in a world that seems very different than it was on September the 10th.
All of you will be learning to live in a world that looks very much like a police state. Most of you will also be learning to live in a state of denial about how overtly fascist the country has become. Some of you though will have difficulty learning that portion of the program. We have a name for you: “terrorists.”

The moment the second plane hit the second building, when we knew it was a terrorist attack, many felt that our lives would never be the same.
My handlers wanted me to emphasize that we had no clue that anything unusual was underway prior to the second plane hitting the second tower. We actually knew that there was some serious shit going down long before that time. The fact that no less than four commercial airliners had been simultaneously hijacked and one of them crashed into New York City’s most visible landmark provided pretty good clues that something might be afoot. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the second plane hit the second tower that my aides chose to interrupt my reading time to inform me that there might be a problem. I’m still pissed off about it too, because now I’ll never know what happened to that goat.

We have gained new heroes, those who ran into burning buildings to save others: our police and our firefighters.
And just a few short days ago – when we sent Rudy G’s Gestapo troops to show them how we deal with those in this country who choose to lawfully assemble to address legitimate grievances – we showed the level of contempt that we have for these heroes. As for the ones still buried in the rubble, we will be skiploading them into trucks to dump at the Fresh Kills Landfill. As you can well imagine, we are having a good laugh about that at the White House.

(APPLAUSE)

We’ve seen that type of hate before, and the only possible response is to confront it and to defeat it.
This is the part of the speech where I make the obligatory comparison of our current ‘enemy’ to Adolf Hitler. My daddy did the same thing with Saddam Hussein, as many of you will recall. In truth though, the only thing that these guys have in common with Hitler is that their rise to power was financed partly by my family, just like the real Hitler’s rise was.

(APPLAUSE)

This new enemy seeks to destroy our freedom and impose its views.
This is actually one of the truest statements that I will be making here this evening. What I won’t be telling you though is that the new enemy is me and my cabinet.

We value education; the terrorists do not believe women should be educated, or should have health care, or should leave their homes.
Neither, for that matter, do any of the other groups who we are considering propping up as the new Afghani government, but we don’t generally like to talk about that.

We value the right to speak our minds;
We may value it, but don’t anybody think about trying to actually exercise it. Always keep in mind what my errand-boy Ari Fleischer said about watching what you say and do.

This enemy tries to hide behind a peaceful faith. But those who celebrate the murder of innocent men, women and children have no religion, have no conscience and have no mercy.
That is why I want you all to go out there and wave your flags and sing God Bless America while we continue to actively assist in an impending genocide of some seven-and-a-half million innocent civilians.

(APPLAUSE)

We wage a war to save civilization itself.
That, of course, assumes that we are defining ‘civilization’ as the right of the select few to exploit the resources and the people of this entire planet.

This is a different war from any our nation has ever faced, a war on many fronts, against terrorists who operate in more than 60 different countries. And this is a war that must be fought not only overseas, but also here at home.
For those who haven’t figured it out yet, this is a war against all the people of the world, including all of you.

I recently spoke to high school students in Maryland and realized that for the first time ever these seniors will graduate in the midst of a war in our own country.
I also realized that, in a few years, a lot of them would likely be dead or missing limbs. Many others will likely develop some mysterious ailments as a result of exposure to all the toxic shit we are dumping in the areas where we will be sending in ground troops.

We have entered a new era, and this new era requires new responsibilities, both for the government and for our people.
Our responsibility will be to continue lying to you in the hopes that most of you will continue to support our illegal and unjustified military actions, and to continue doing our very best to scare you into surrendering your few remaining civil liberties. Your responsibility will be to continue being scared and to foolishly continue to trust us here in Washington.

The government has a responsibility to protect our citizens, and that starts with homeland security. The first attack against America came by plane, and we are now making our airports and airplanes safer. We have posted the National Guard in America’s airports and placed undercover air marshals on many flights.
This is just a first step aimed at acclimating all of you to the constant presence of armed and uniformed military personnel intruding into your daily lives. And, by the way, don’t make the mistake of thinking that all that airport security is ultimately aimed solely at keeping people out of the country.

Four Americans have now died from anthrax out of a total of 17 people who have been infected. The Postal Service has processed more than 30 billion pieces of mail since September the 11th, and so far we’ve identified three different letters that contained anthrax.
I can’t do the math myself, but they tell me that that means that one in every ten billion pieces of mail that was processed during the outrageously overhyped Anthrax scare was tainted. Now I know that I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even I can figure out that the risk might have been somewhat misrepresented by our subservient media whores.

I’m proud of the way our health care and postal workers and the American people are responding with calm in the face of this deadly new threat.
I’m even more proud of the way our faithful servants in the press have obligingly and rather shamelessly whipped all of you into an Anthrax frenzy.

(APPLAUSE)

To coordinate our efforts, we have created the new Office of Homeland Security. Its director, my good friend and former Governor Tom Ridge, reports directly to me and works with all of our federal agencies, state and local governments and the private sector on a national strategy to strengthen our homeland protections.
I think you are going to like Tom. He’s going to help coordinate the creation of a unified, nationwide, highly militarized police force that will operate largely in secrecy. It will look and function very much like the Gestapo. As all you patriotic Americans know, however, Nazi Germany’s Gestapo was created for all the wrong reasons, while ours is being created for all the right reasons.

Our enemies have threatened other acts of terror. We take each threat seriously. And when we have evidence of credible threats, we will issue appropriate alerts.
We will continue to do our very best to scare the hell out of all of you and make you feel as vulnerable as we possibly can. Think of how happy you’ll then be when we insist on ‘protecting’ you.

A terrorism alert is not a signal to stop your life. It is a call to be vigilant, to know that your government is on high alert and to add your eyes and ears to our efforts to find and stop those who want to do us harm.
If you’ve been paying close attention, the issuing of a terrorism alert should signal to you that more of your rights are about to get stripped away.

We are destroying training camps, disrupting communications and dismantling air defenses. We are now bombing Taliban front lines. We are deliberately and systematically hunting down these murderers and we will bring them to justice.
We are carpet bombing with B-52s and making liberal use of cluster bombs, fuel-air bombs and depleted uranium. We have decimated villages, scored direct hits on a hospital, a nursing home and a food distribution center, and have seriously damaged a dam. We have created an unconscionable refugee crisis and have effectively cut off food supplies to millions of starving Afghanis. And we’ve hardly gotten started. Even if we knew where to find those we have branded as the ‘murderers’ – against whom, by the way, we have no real evidence – it would be impossible to hunt them down from a jet flying at 40,000 feet.

(APPLAUSE)

Throughout this battle, we adhere to our values. Unlike our enemy, we respect life. We do not target innocent civilians.
And if you believe that, then I guess you haven’t been paying attention to the situation that we’ve created in Iraq over the last decade.

We care for the innocent people of Afghanistan, so we continue to provide humanitarian aid, even while their government tries to steal the food we send.
We tell this story so often that it is rather amazing that anyone believes it anymore. This is the standard lie that we use to explain why offering any meaningful humanitarian assistance would be pointless. That is so that all of you don’t needlessly burden yourselves with feelings of guilt over the humanitarian crises that we routinely create. In this conflict, we have added a new twist to the purported humanitarian aid being offered – cleverly disguising the food packets to blend in with the cluster bomblets that are already beginning to litter the Afghani landscape.

Food or cluster bomb?

When the terrorists and their supporters are gone, the people of Afghanistan will say with the rest of the world, “Good riddance.”
If everything goes as planned, the people of Afghanistan aren’t going to be saying much of anything. As a matter of fact, we aren’t sure that there will be any people in Afghanistan.

(APPLAUSE)

We are at the beginning of our efforts in Afghanistan, and Afghanistan is only the beginning of our efforts in the world. No group or nation should mistake Americans’ (sic) intentions.
Lest anyone has, let me state it as clearly as possible: our intent is specifically to bomb the bejesus out of any and all pockets of resistance to our ultimate goal of global hegemony.

I recently received a letter from a fourth grade girl that seemed to say it all.
Finally my staffers gave me something to read that I can actually understand, unlike all those briefings they are always handing me. Now this person actually makes sense. I’m going to see if I can create a cabinet position for her, so that I have someone on my educational level that I can confer with.

Countless Americans gave blood in the aftermath of the attacks.
Countless more will give blood before this is all over, although it won’t necessarily be voluntarily.

Americans have a lot to offer, so I’ve created a task force to develop additional ways people can get directly involved in this war effort, by making our homes and neighborhoods and schools and workplaces safer.
We want you all to start spying on each other. And please don’t hesitate to report anything that you perceive to be ‘anti-American’ activity, whether the suspect be a neighbor, a co-worker, or even a family member. We already have your employers and your bankers spying on you for us, but we could really use some help from each and every one of you.

Too many have the wrong idea of Americans as shallow, materialist consumers who care only about getting rich or getting ahead.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that that is the precise set of values that is pitched to Americans by our schools and other social institutions, through our media – both ‘news’ and ‘entertainment,’ though how you tell the difference is beyond me – and through the icons of popular culture?

Our government has the responsibility to put needless partisanship behind us and meet new challenges:
It is time now to do away with the transparent and rather silly pretense of having a two-party system.

I made some proposals to stimulate economic growth, which will create new jobs and make America less dependent on foreign oil.
That at least is the spin that we have tried to put on our alleged ‘stimulus package.’ In truth, what we are planning to do is hand out massive tax breaks to the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the country. We don’t really expect that this will create any new jobs, but it will further consolidate wealth and power into the hands of an elite few. Meanwhile, jobs will continue to disappear more quickly and more frequently than Dick Cheney.

(APPLAUSE)