March 2004 Archives

That's not my headline. It's the Wall Street Journal's.

You should read Scot J. Paltrow's story. Then ask yourself whether you respect the Bush/Cheney Administration's decision not to cooperate fully with the 9-11 Commission.

Speaking of President George W. Bush, let's look at just one of Paltrow's examples of an inconsistency in the official accounts of that day. He writes:

Shortly after a passenger jet crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers raced back to the military headquarters from a meeting on Capitol Hill. The four-star general, acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that day, went directly to the Pentagon's command center. With smoke spreading into the cavernous room, he ordered the officer in charge, Maj. Gen. W. Montague Winfield, to raise the military's alert status to Defcon III, the highest state of readiness since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

That account is based on interviews with Gen. Winfield and a former White House official. In the months after Sept. 11, President Bush had a different public explanation about who put the military on high alert. The president said publicly at least twice that he gave the order. During a town-hall meeting in Orlando on Dec. 4, 2001, Mr. Bush said that after the attacks, "one of the first acts I did was to put our military on alert."

[...]

Regarding Mr. Bush's statements that he had ordered troops to a higher alert status himself, Mr. Bartlett said the president provided a "description that the public could understand" and spoke in "broad strokes." Gen. Myers and the Pentagon declined to comment.

This is not nitpicking. The public easily can understand that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs made the order. It is absurd and insulting to assume otherwise. Either President Bush made the order or he did not. Perhaps he can take a little time away from his fundraising to explain himself.

Then again, this is just the latest example illuminating where this president's priorities really are.

(Thanks to Atrios for the link.)

Atrios previews tonight's 60 Minutes interview of Richard Clarke by Lesley Stahl.

Atrios thinks that it is more important to note that the Bush/Cheney Administration reduced from a cabinet level position to a staff position the role of the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism than it is to question whether Richard Clarke is now speaking out because of that demotion.

Funny how journalists can sometimes overlook the real story, isn't it?

The Bush/Cheney team demoted the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism from the cabinet status it enjoyed under the Clinton Administration. The Bush/Cheney team also did not find the time to have President Bush briefed by Clarke until after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

These seem like important points to remember. I'm also sure that they have nothing to do with the Bush/Cheney Administration's refusal to cooperate fully with the 9-11 Commission.

The Bush/Cheney Administration did not take the Al Qaeda threat seriously before September 11. They arguably have not taken it that serious lately with the diversion away from the war on terror to fight its war against Saddam Hussein.

I think one term of this madness is enough.

Mark Schmitt has carried on an admirable battle exposing the problems with the Medicare prescription drug benefit for some time now.

So, he admits that he is enjoying the Bush/Cheney Administration's present difficulties about that legislation.

What the Bush/Cheney Administration did with Medicare is not a little lie. This is a big deal. As Schmitt explains:

If you remember how obsessed I was with the Medicare bill last fall (back when no one read this blog, and most people who looked at it ran away because all I ever seemed to write about was M-E-D-I-C-A-R-E over and over again), guess how much I am enjoying the latest events? Answer: a lot. Not only did Tom Scully of CMS (the sub-agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid) threaten to fire his agency's actuary, whose independence had been written into law by a Republican Congress, if he revealed the real cost of the bill, it now turns out that Doug Badger of the White House -- the purest of hacks -- may have pressured Scully as well.

Conning the American taxpayers out of almost $150 billion -- that has to be a big deal. Working in the federal government, or in a foundation, one becomes a little inured to big numbers, but not numbers this big. This is $555 per man, woman and child in the United States! Will someone ask a Republican member of Congress if there is a definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors" that includes oral sex, but not grand larceny?

The challenge now is to milk this thing. It's not enough for the Medicare bill to be proven a bad deal. That's been done. It has to become the defining example of Bush domestic policy, the kind of thing that will be associated with his name and his party for decades, the way "forced busing" was associated with Democrats for decades after the last bus ran. It should be more than just an issue that influences the election. It should be so decisively rejected that it puts an end to this kind of "Mayberry Machiavelli" policy-making forever, and thoroughly discredits everyone associated with it. I want the backlash to be an insurance policy, so that even if Bush is reelected, the next time around the sane members of Congress, of all ideologies, have the backbone to say, "you're not taking us down that road again."

This is a big deal. It should be a big deal for voters. And those voters should remember for decades just what the Bush/Cheney team did during the Medicare debate.

Bush/Cheney promised to usher in a responsibility era. It is time for him to take some.

Josh Marshall writes that credibility is going to be an issue -- perhaps the major issue -- in this presidential campaign.

The bad news is that Sen. John Kerry needs to make sure that he is not the one with the credibility gap after the Bush/Cheney initial campaign advertising blitz is over. Marshall is concerned about the mistakes being made by Cheney and how important it is for other leading Democrats to get off the sideline.

You should read his post just for that analysis. I want to share, however, a paragraph has damning of the Bush/Cheney team as any I have read so far.

The winning campaign against the president is equally clear. He doesn't tell the truth. Almost nothing he has told the American people has turned out to be true (from budgets to jobs, from wmds to his personal past). In many cases, that's because he's lied to them. In others, it's because he's promised things he had no reason to believe were true. In some instances, he just failed to deliver.

William Saletan has written an important analysis of the Bush/Cheney team's tactics. He writes:

If you oppose George Bush's policies, or if you're supported by anybody who opposes George Bush's policies, you're anti-American.

That was the message of the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, who suggested that his opponent from Massachusetts was against the Pledge of Allegiance. Now it's his son's campaign message, too.

Facts don't matter when you run on this theme.

Perhaps I should make this a blog topic. It certainly appears as if it will be a recurring feature this campaign year.

(Thanks to Lean Left for the link.)

Perhaps $500 billion a year deficits are inevitable when the Chairman of the House Budget Committee is so blinded by his ideology that he is unable or unwilling to see how the Bush Administration's irresponsible tax cuts have harmed the government's balance sheet and the economy.

The latest example of this troubling situation is explained by the Associated Press' Alan Fram.

The House Budget Committee is moving toward making it harder for Congress to increase spending but not to cut taxes, spelling a likely election-year clash between the GOP-run House and Senate over President Bush's planned tax reductions.

Last week, Democrats joined by four moderate Republicans forced the Senate to approve a provision requiring that any tax cuts or spending increases for benefits like Medicare be paid for with other budget savings.

But Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, said he had the votes to push a bill through his House budget panel on Wednesday that would clamp that restriction only on spending increases, not tax cuts.

"They pay for themselves" by strengthening the economy, Nussle said Tuesday of tax cuts. "We shouldn't have to pay for tax cuts" by finding offsetting savings from elsewhere in the budget. (emphasis added)

Nussle is engaged in an ideological war against government. The mountains of red ink created under his stewardship of the budget will not get in the way of his cause.

That's columnist Jay Bookman's apt description for the Bush Administration's actions during the Medicare prescription drug bill debate.

Two months after the critical vote in Congress, the White House finally admitted the truth, after a fashion. It announced that it was shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that the actual cost of the Medicare bill had zoomed to $534 billion.

"That really is a shocker," Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the anti-deficit Concord Coalition, said at the time. "It's a huge change. If a number like this had been floating around the Capitol last fall, it never would have passed."

Exactly.

What we have here is government by willful deception, a scandal compounded by the fact that ethical public servants were actually intimidated into not doing their jobs. And unfortunately, it is only part of a pattern of such behavior.

And all the more reason to work hard during this election season to see that President George W. Bush is not returned to the White House for a second term.

Josh Marshall writes:

More deliberate deception from the Vice President of the United States -- something that has become terribly familiar.

It is amazing how the Republicans' demands for executive branch truth-telling suddenly became inoperative on January 20, 2001.

One of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post columnists has penned an article about "the warning Kerry ignored."

Brian Sullivan, a former special agent for the Federal Aviation Administration, charges that Sen. John Kerry ignored warnings about the lax security at Boston's Logan Airport prior to September 11.

But, as Hesiod points out on Conterspin Central, Sullivan on September 16 told NBC News that "I think Senator Kerry did get it to the right people and that they were about to take the right action."

Hesiod wonders why Sullivan has changed his mind. I am sure it has nothing to do with the upcoming election.

Since it appears that we are going to have to deal with a bunch of flip-flopping talk during this campaign, Eric Alterman (thanks to some help from a Daily Kos contributor) has a nice handy recap of just some of the flip-flops that one can find in President George W. Bush's record.

You know, in case someone wanted to do a balanced campaign story.

The Calpundit returns to his argument that the Social Security system is not facing a major crisis in response to an article in the Washington Monthly (the magazine that is soon to be his new home).

This is a tiresome refrain. The numbers are actually pretty straightforward and the facts are simple: Social Security is not in crisis, and fixing it isn't really that hard or that painful.

But the Calpundit, thankfully, is too truthful to buy that line completely. He describes one example of a series of Social Security reforms that could close the long-term funding gap:

1. Today, the payroll tax applies only to earnings up to $87,000. If you phase in a removal of this cap beginning in 2018 and make the payroll tax into a flat tax, revenues increase by 2.13 percentage points.

2. Under current law, you can retire at age 62, 65, or 67 (the longer you wait, the higher your benefits). If you phase in a change to 65, 67, and 70, costs are reduced by .59 percentage points.

3. Means testing, which reduces retirement benefits for high earners, reduces costs by 1.65 percentage points.

First, if you raise the payroll tax cap, are you going to keep benefits as they are or continue to allow people who pay in more to the system to get back more in benefits? If you continue to allow benefits on payroll taxes paid over $87,000 a year, then you run into the possibility that ex-CEOs and professional athletes could receive into the six figures from Social Security after they reach the beneift eligibility age. If you cap the benefits but tax on all income, Social Security begins to resemble something more like a welfare program. Either result is not a political bargain.

Second, as an Xer already facing an increase in normal eligibility age to 67, that one does not seem so hard. Of course, tell that to someone who does not sit at a computer all day and works on an assembly line or in a coal mine or at another strenuous job.

Third, while I have supported means testing for years, one should not assume it is an easy or painless solution. (It is a cornerstone of the Concord Coalition's approach to closing the long-term deficit facing our nation.) But liberals and conservatives loathe the idea.

This is not a reform set that is not hard nor painful. It actually includes a significant amount of pain. Any national politician who proposed them would be committing career suicide since we are, alas, not yet ready to deal with this issue as seriously as we should.

(And this example takes Social Security in a vacuum, not considering Medicare, Medicaid, and what happens to the rest of the federal budget when there is no longer a nice big Social Security cash surplus to use to mask the federal budget deficit's true size.)

The Calpundit deserves credit for outlining the scope of the solution, as far as it goes. He is much better than most Republicans who argue for a free-lunch privatization solution that somehow figures we will find the trillions in transition costs thanks to some financial jujitsu. He is also better than many Democrats who refuse to see how serious the solution could actually prove to be.

The Calpundit's example solution recognizes this fact, even if some of his rhetoric does not appear to do so.

I've decided to end my blogging break because an excellent point requiring your consideration has been made by Atrios and Josh Marshall.

They both argue that it is time for John Kerry to hit the president hard on national security and the war on terrorism.

This seems like it would be a strong point for Bush, and Marshall does wonder if it takes the debate onto territory friendly to the president.

Atrios' post responds with a quick summary of why the president is vulnerable on national security and terror issues:

We now know that we haven't been devoting the resources to find Bin Laden, because we're now "stepping up" that attempt with Operation Mountain Storm. Why we didn't step up that threat two years ago is obvious - we had to mobilize for Iraq and this gang can't walk and chew gum at the same time (frankly, they can't do them separately either).

So, resources were diverted away from a fighting a gathered threat to a non-threat. We've spent $200 billion fighting this non-threat, much of which went into the pockets of corporations which failed to provide the services they were contracted to do. The immediate aftermath of the Iraq war was bungled, largely due to the utter lack of planning by the "grownups." Suspected WMD sites were looted, civil infrastructure wasn't repaired as the money was diverted to contractors who didn't do it, and civil order was not maintained.

We're spending billions on missile defense, and a measly few million on improving port security. While terrorists may obtain a nuclear weapon, they are unlikely to obtain a reliable intercontinental missile delivery system. Why bother? They just need to float into any port and push the button.

I have long argued that the Democrats cannot --and should not -- cede the national security argument to Bush. Now, as Atrios and Marshall explain, it is time to move beyond that.

There is no reason for Kerry to wait for Bush to "bring it on." It is time to take it to Bush.