When you Convolute Language, you’re trying to not say anything.
… a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals…
From wikipedia:
In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime, an area surrounding a black hole or a wormhole, inside which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from inside the horizon can never reach the observer, and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer’s side is never seen again.
But it works its kicks in various funky manners in science fiction stories, so maybe Bush can skew back there. For Time Horizon, wikipedia presents us with this:
Although short term horizons such as end of day, end of week, end of month matter in accounting, generally it is mere summing-up and the simplest mark to market processes that take place at these short term horizons. No scenario analysis or mark to future activities are usually undertaken for such short periods, except for very large portfolios.
The most common horizons used in planning are one “quarter” (a quarter year, or three months), a year, two years, three years, four years (especially in a representative democracy where this is a quite common term of office and election cycle) and five years (in corporate planning). More far-sighted companies and government agencies may also use between ten and one hundred years. Thirty years is often used in mortgage contracts and US Treasury bonds such as the long bond. One hundred years, sometimes considered equal to seven generations, is a time horizon often cited by the ancient Iroquois and modern Greens. The Forestry Commission in the UK plans over a century into the future. There are Japanese corporations rumoured to have five-hundred year plans, which amount to a sort of official science fiction story or myth to which the company commits itself – these are highly secret and have not been confirmed to exist.
I thought the aspirational goals were pretty well set, with the returning Oil Companies — the aspiration now is Fortification from any happenstance in the surrounding area. But maybe we still have to categorize the
dozens of weapons of mass destruction related program activities.
Which still is my favorite convolution of language from the Bush years, with all due respect to Mr. General Time Horizon for Meeting Aspirational Goals.