From Maine:
Bush's Numbers Racket
It's apparent that, in the space of ten days, the fear of being held accountable for those numbers put the White House in panic mode. More realistic estimates conflict dramatically with the report from the White House; according to a report on ABC News, a Blue Chip Survey of private economists predicts job growth at only 1 million - 1.6 million less than the White House.
On a broader note, you'd think the Bush administration would stick with meaningless rhetoric and abandon specific numbers altogether; numbers have not been kind to these people.
Consider the highly publicized issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. In their build-up to war, the administration was not shy about giving us numbers. According to Colin Powell, "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent." To date, these numbers constitute a 100% error rate, but - as with the job growth numbers - are considered of no importance. Mr. Powell insists: "The bottom line is this. The president made the right decision."
Consider the estimated cost of the Medicare prescription drug program. During the promotion of this bill (which, as written, is a windfall for drug manufacturers and private insurance companies), the president relied on a price tag prepared by the Congressional Budget Office - $395 billion, over ten years. Less than two months later - and after the bill was passed - the White House jacked up that estimate by more than a third, to $534 billion. Mr. Duffy, as with Mr. Powell, is kind enough to provide us with "the bottom line" again: "The bottom line is, President Bush made a commitment to ... a prescription drug benefit ... and he delivered."
The self-serving nature of these errors leads to an obvious conclusion: Mr. Bush is either consistently incompetent, or consistently lying. The bottom line is, there's no reason both can't be true.
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