BUSH’S NOSE GETS LONGER AND LONGER BUT
HIS FOLLOWERS WILL NEVER SEE IT BECAUSE
THEY’RE BLINDED BY THE LIGHT—OR IS THAT “RIGHT”?

Bush’s people being mainly religiomaniacs and, therefore, unable to tell the truth from a lie (because they’ve been lied to in the Bible and lied to by their parents and religious leaders all their lives) are unable to determine when they’re being lied to. As you know, if you keep up on the science of evolutionary psychology, there’s an arms race going on between liars and those who can detect liars. Each evolutionary leap increases the ability of the dominant group, each going one up on the other until the next leap deposes the latter.

The best liar, of course, is the liar who believes his own lies. Religious lies are, therefore, harder to see through, and religious people are the most duped of all human groups because they believe a huge, nose popping, piegod in the sky lie. But, anyhow, here anyhow is a laundry list of Bush lies exposed in his budget:

[Open quote.]

Almost no aspect of his [Bush’s] budget squares with reality, John Farmer says.


Bush's credibility gap growing rapidly

John Farmer
Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger
February 14, 2005

Bad as they are, the budget gap and the trade gap are not the worst gaps facing the federal government. That honor belongs to the fastest growing of them all – the credibility gap.

It wasn't always that way. In the years of greatest national crisis, the Great Depression and World War II, Americans of almost every political persuasion (except maybe Communists and the looniest of the lefties) believed what their government told them and generally identified with Washington and its priorities.

Beginning with the Vietnam War and escalating with Watergate, that faith began to fade. Both parties bear the blame – Democrats for the lies of the Johnson administration during Vietnam, Republicans for the criminal mischief of the Nixon years and Watergate.

Today, thanks to the almost daily deceptions practiced by the Bush administration and its refusal under any conditions to admit any mistake, the credibility gap is deeper than ever.

The president's latest plunge into the gap involves his $2.5 trillion budget. If a literary entry, it would be a real contender for the fiction prize. Almost no aspect of the Bush budget squares with reality, beginning with its total-spending claims.

The cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, currently a not-insignificant $6 billion a month, is not included, if you can believe it. Everyone knows the money will have to be raised and spent, so why omit it from the budget? One reason is that its inclusion would make it more difficult for Bush to meet his promise (surely just as bogus) to cut the $420 billion-plus annual deficit in half in four years. (Even that deficit estimate is a sham; it would be far worse but for the inclusion of Social Security taxes.)

An even larger cost item missing from the budget is the amount required to finance Bush's plan to take money from Social Security to finance his privatization plan. It's a glaring omission – a sum ranging from almost $800 billion to between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending on which estimate of potential offsets one accepts. One wonders, how did he overlook it?

As if that wasn't enough, the president also fails to include the cost of making his now-notorious tax cuts permanent, a $1 trillion-plus drain on the treasury of the next decade. Hardly chump change.

But it's not merely costs that the Bush budget omits. It sins on the other side of the ledger by anticipating revenue it either has little chance of getting its hands on or never plans to collect.

The former involves revenue Bush counts on from opening the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil exploration. Fat chance. Unless Congress has a radical change of heart, the reserve in Alaska will remain off-limits to the oil industry. The second dodge involves the cash income Bush anticipates from the Alternative Minimum Tax while at the same time he proposes it be eliminated.

The budget duplicity comes on the heels of Bush's Social Security shell game. His much-heralded privatization scheme, the administration now concedes, will have no effect on closing the fund's anticipated shortfall. Surprise, surprise! But what's worse is the way the administration has employed conflicting estimates of economic growth to peddle privatization.

It's needed, the Bushies argue, because the aging of the population will, over time, slow economic growth and thus not produce enough payroll tax revenue to meet annual Social Security benefit costs. In the next breath, however, they insist that robust economic growth will be a bonanza for those who opt to privatize part of their Social Security account. Well, which is it?

Perhaps the worst thing about Bush's voodoo economic policies is how they have ensnared honorable men in the Republican leadership – House Speaker Dennis Hastert, for one. He's out there defending the plans when (at least one hopes) he knows better. Ultimately, Hastert's own credibility and that of the others who go along with the administration will be at stake come the 2006 congressional elections.

To his credit, Bush has been incredibly successful at keeping his party in Congress in line considering how far he has strayed from small-government conservative orthodoxy. As conservative economist Bruce Bartlett put it in a National Public Radio interview, Bush "has spent like a drunken sailor," creating the biggest federal government in history. Indeed, he has. If they had a Betty Ford clinic for big spenders, Bush would be a prime candidate.

He's on the wagon now, Bush claims. Whether Republicans who control Congress will continue to stick with him and follow him into the credibility gap will be the real test of this Congress and Bush's ultimate success or failure.
[Close quote.]
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“Boozer’s revision: A bird in the hand is dead.” from THE OFFICIAL RULES