GEORGE BUSH, LOSING FRIENDS FASTER THAN JANET JACKSON
Once begun, leakage of public confidence in a president's pronouncements is difficult to stanch.
This is impressive. We're catching George Will, infamous conservative pundit, in the act of telling the truth. Apparently, there is a God. And He is smiting George Bush with a mighty sword-fishwrapper...
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washingtonpost.com
For Bush, It's Game Time
By George F. Will -- Sunday, February 8, 2004
After this winter of his discontent, the president needs spring training. He is far from midseason form, and his accumulating errors are undermining the premise of his reelection campaign, which is: Wartime demands hard choices and sacrifices, and a president who is steady, measured and believable.
Rhetorical carelessness and overreaching began before the war, when various administration officials ignored Mark Twain's warning that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning bug and lightning. It would have been much better if the president and others, speaking about Iraqi weapons, had said "we believe" rather than "we know."
After the war, in May, on Polish television, President Bush said, "We found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories." No, we did not. "So what's the difference?" said the president in December about the failure to find WMDs, because "if [Saddam Hussein] were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger." Such casualness, which would be alarming in any president, is especially so in one whose vaulting foreign policy ambitions have turned his first term into Woodrow Wilson's third term, devoted to planting democracy and "universal values" in hitherto inhospitable places.
Once begun, leakage of public confidence in a president's pronouncements is difficult to stanch. This president's certitude that $400 billion "is enough to meet our commitments" for 10 years under the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement was followed by a one-third upward revision of the estimate. Especially dismaying was the fact that the president seemed not to know -- or, worse, care -- that an inherent problem with vast welfare state expansions is that no one can know crucial variables, such as, in this instance, the number of people choosing to participate and the coming menu of new drugs.
Republicans are swiftly forfeiting the perception that they are especially responsible stewards of government finances. It is surreal for a Republican president to submit a budget to a Republican-controlled Congress and have Republican legislators vow to remove the "waste" that he has included and that they have hitherto funded.
The president does indeed propose killing 65 programs and substantially curtailing 63. But even if Congress fully complies, which it won't, the savings would be just $4.9 billion -- a rounding error in a $2.4 trillion budget. That $4.9 billion would pay less than six days' interest on the national debt.
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