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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (2662)	2/5/2002 10:46:46 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15516

Bush's Focus -- And the Country's By David S. Broder Thursday, January 31, 2002; Page A25 He may have done too well for his own good. By the time President Bush had conjured up a picture of "tens of thousands of trained terrorists . . . still at large" and warned that "the world's most dangerous regimes" -- North Korea, Iran and Iraq – could "threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons," most viewers of Tuesday's State of the Union Address probably were suffering an overdose of emotion. What came after his call for "the largest increase in defense spending in two decades" seemed an afterthought. Even with the repeated promise of "good jobs," the whole domestic and economic program was a blur to minds still wondering how we would ever root out all the killers in our midst or topple the rulers of Baghdad, Tehran and Pyongyang. Bush spoke from a position of enormous political power, his job approval in a Washington Post poll published the morning of the speech "higher and more protracted than any modern president." And yet, that and other surveys found that domestic concerns now preoccupy the public more than the threat of terrorism. Bush sought to link his military-diplomatic strategy with his domestic agenda under the rubric of "security," but he gave far different weight to the two pieces. Last week's Battleground poll conducted by Republican Ed Goeas and Democrat Celinda Lake said that voters rate the domestic economy their top worry over terrorism by a 2 to 1 margin. And within the economy, they found, the biggest Concern by far is the rising cost of medical care. Bush made no explicit reference to that problem and devoted only one paragraph toward the end of the speech to the whole issue of health. Yet, as I learned from Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson earlier that same day, next week's budget will show some major increases and significant policy innovations in health care. It's clear this is not where Bush's mind is centered. The import and intent of this State of the Union was to wrench the nation's focus back to the subject that is all-consuming to the president: the war on terrorism. When he said last September that defeating terrorism would be the chief purpose of his presidency, he meant it. Everything that The Post's Bob Woodward and Dan Balz have written in their detailed reconstruction of the first days in the White House following Sept. 11 confirms that Bush's instinctive response to the attacks was to put his administration and the country on a wartime footing. As the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks have receded, Americans have moved back toward a pre-crisis mood. You could feel the difference in the House chamber where Bush spoke. The emotion was far less intense than it had been when Bush last addressed the lawmakers and the nation, just nine days after the assault. Democrats have to try to separate the domestic issues on which they disagree with Bush from the war on terrorism to have any hope of prevailing in the November elections. So far their position looks weak – with No consistent message on taxes, trade or other issues. House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt's call for a White House-congressional summit on domestic policy is a device for buying time, an offer he knows Bush will refuse. But the Democrats are not yet out of the game. When the budget comes out next week, there will be hundreds of freezes or cuts in programs important to domestic constituencies. When I asked Budget Director Mitch Daniels the other day how much political flak he expects, his answer was: "It depends if we can sell guns vs. butter." That's an honest answer, but it implies that Bush, as well as the Democrats, will have to emphasize the gap between his top priority, the war on terrorism, and the domestic concerns now uppermost on the minds of voters. And then there is the Enron factor. It was striking that while Bush was ready to denounce by name the nations on his target list of terrorist states, he was squeamish about dealing explicitly with Enron and its auditor, Arthur Andersen. The day of the speech, the stock market had dived on fears that other companies might be cooking their books. Almost everyone with money in a pension fund is worried. But Bush gave it barely a glance: three sentences at the end, with no acknowledgment of the source of the fears. Strong as his support on the war undoubtedly is, he has left his political opponents an opening. © 2002 The Washington Post Company

To: Mephisto who wrote (2662)	2/5/2002 11:00:54 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Bush's Aggressive Accounting "Leave no defense contractor behind." The New York Times February 5, 2002 By PAUL KRUGMAN Senator Kent Conrad actually got it wrong yesterday when he criticized the Bush administration's new budget for its Enron-like accounting. Last year's budget, the one that included that big tax cut, was the one with a strong touch of Enron about it. This year's budget involves a different, though equally pernicious, kind of aggressive accounting. Enron's illusion of profitability rested largely on "mark to market" accounting. The company entered into contracts that would yield profits, if at all, only over a number of years. But Enron jumped the gun: it treated the capitalized value of those hypothetical future gains as a current profit, which could then be used to justify high stock prices, big bonuses for executives, and so on. And that's more or less what happened in last year's budget. The Bush administration took a bullish 10-year surplus projection — a projection that had a built-in upward bias, and in any case should have been regarded as no more than a guess — and treated it as if it were hard fact. On the basis of those surplus fantasies the administration — aided by an audit committee, otherwise known as the U.S. Congress, that failed to exercise due diligence — gave itself a big bonus in the form of a huge tax cut. A year later the wrongness of the assumptions behind last year's budget is there for all to see, and in a rational world the administration would be called to account for misleading the American public. But instead the Bush administration has turned to the political equivalent of another increasingly common accounting trick: the "one-time charge." According to Investopedia.com, one-time charges are "used to bury unfavorable expenses or investments that went wrong." That is, instead of admitting that it has been doing a bad job, management claims that bad results are caused by extraordinary, unpredictable events: "We're making lots of money, but we had $1 billion in special expenses associated with our takeover of XYZ Corporation." And of course extraordinary events do happen; the trick is to make the most of them, as a way of evading responsibility. (Some companies, such as Cisco, have a habit of incurring "one-time charges" over and over again.) The events of Sept. 11 shocked and horrified the nation; they also presented the Bush administration with a golden opportunity to bury its previous misdeeds. Has more than $4 trillion of projected surplus suddenly evaporated into thin air? Pay no attention to the tax cut: it's all because of the war on terrorism. In short, the administration's strategy is to prevent criticism of what amounts to a fiscal debacle by wrapping its budget in the flag. And I mean that literally: the budget report released yesterday came wrapped in a red, white and blue cover depicting the American flag. But why am I so cynical? Isn't the war on terrorism a big deal? The answer is that emotionally, morally, it is indeed a big deal; but fiscally it's very nearly a rounding error. It's true that the administration is using the terrorist threat to justify a huge military buildup. But there are a couple of funny things about that buildup. First, if we really have to give up butter in order to pay for all those guns, shouldn't we reconsider future tax cuts that were conceived in a time of abundance? "Not over my dead body" isn't really an answer. And it's particularly hard to take all the grim war talk seriously when the administration is, at the very same time, proposing an additional $600 billion in tax cuts. Second, the military buildup seems to have little to do with the actual threat, unless you think that Al Qaeda's next move will be a frontal assault by several heavy armored divisions. We non-defense experts are a bit puzzled about why an attack by maniacs armed with box cutters justifies spending $15 billion on 70-ton artillery pieces, or developing three different advanced fighters (before Sept. 11 even administration officials suggested that this was too many). No politician hoping for re- election will dare to say it, but the administration's new motto seems to be "Leave no defense contractor behind." I could go on, but you get the point. The administration insists, and may even believe, that the war on terror has become a mission. But as far as the budget goes, it's not a mission; it's an excuse. nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (2662)	2/6/2002 3:04:29 AM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

An Orgy of Defense Spending Bush's 'axis of evil' rhetoric fabricates a need. Los Angeles Times February 5, 2002 E-mail story By Robert Scheer: An Orgy of Defense Spending Bush's 'axis of evil' rhetoric fabricates a need. Now we get to see just how cowardly the Democrats in Congress can be. President Bush has proposed the most preposterous military buildup in human history--annual spending of $451 billion by 2007--and nary a word of criticism has been heard from the other side of the aisle. The president is drunk with the popularity that his war on terrorism has brought, and those sober Democrats and Republicans, who know better, are afraid to wrestle him for the keys to the budget before he drives off a cliff. The red ink that Bush wants us to bleed to line the pockets of the defense industry, along with the tax cuts for the rich, will do more damage to our country than any terrorist. The result will be an economically hobbled United States, unable to solve its major domestic problems or support meaningful foreign aid, its enormous wealth sacrificed at the altar of military hardware that is largely without purpose. Why the panic to throw billions more at the military when even the Pentagon brass have told us it is not needed? Our military forces, much maligned as inadequate by Bush during the election campaign, proved to be lacking in nothing once the administration decided to stop playing footsie with the Taliban and eliminate those monsters of our own creation. It was obviously not a lack of hardware that made us vulnerable to the cruelty of Sept. 11 but rather a failure of will by President Clinton, and then Bush, to brand the Taliban as terrorists and then to take out the well-marked camps of Al Qaeda with the counterinsurgency machine we have been perfecting since the Kennedy administration. Clinton authorized the elimination of Osama bin Laden in 1998, but the spy agencies simply failed to execute the order. Neither, apparently, were they competent enough to track Al Qaeda agents from training camps in Afghanistan to flight schools in Florida. All this even though these agencies possess secret budgets of at least $70 billion a year, combined. Despite the ability to read license plates from outer space and scan the world's e-mail, our intelligence agencies lost the trail of terrorists who easily found cover with lap dancers in strip joints. The bottom line is that we need sharper agents, not more expensive equipment. There is not an item in the Bush budget that will make us more secure from the next terrorist attack. That being obvious, Bush is now resorting to the tried and true "evil empire" rhetorical strategy, grouping the disparate regimes of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil." This alleged axis then becomes the rationale for a grossly expanded military budget, the idea being that the United States must be prepared to fight a conventional war on three fronts. However, no such axis exists. North Korea is a tottering relic of a state whose nuclear operation was about to be bought off under the skilled leadership of the South Korean government when Bush jettisoned the deal. Iraq and Iran have been implacable foes for 25 years, and both were despised by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, a key Muslim ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia, produced 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers--and Bin Laden. Saudi Arabia is also where Al Qaeda does its biggest fund-raising and yet, inexplicably, it is excluded from the new enemies list. Even if the accepted goal were the overthrow of the three brutal regimes targeted by President Bush, that would hardly requirean expansion of a war machine built to humble the Soviet Union in its prime. Is Bush the younger now telling us that his father failed to topple Saddam Hussein because he lacked sufficient firepower? The road to Baghdad was wide open after we obliterated the vaunted Iraqi tank army in a matter of weeks. Or does Bush the younger have even more grandiose plans in mind? His astonishing budget makes sense only if we are planning to use our mighty military in a pseudo-religious quest to create a super-dominant Pax Americana. Bizarre as that sounds, it may be the real framework for Bush's proposed spending orgy. In any case, almost every non-American speaker at the World Economic Forum in New York expressed fear at this specter. Even our own Bill Gates was alarmed at the United States' apparent hubris: "People who feel the world is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred that is very dangerous for all of us." Is it too much to ask that these billions, our billions, be spent to enhance our security rather than further erode it? latimes.com * Robert Scheer writes a syndicated column.