Sigh. Here's Howard Kurtz of the Post, ignoring the obvious falsehood in the Bush interview:
Beat the Press: Bush “made no single mistake that could be replayed again and again with Janet Jackson-like fervor.”
I suppose that will be the press conventional wisdom. I wish this were amazing instead of predictable.
Apparently, it's not big news when GW Bush goes on TV and makes a statement that is totally false. So false that it's not a question of opinion, but a matter of verifiable fact. And not on a trivial matter either. Nor one that could be called a accident. It's an error on a matter of sufficient importance to government that to get it wrong shows either a willingness to try the Big Lie, or a leader very serious out of touch with reality.
Bush on Meet The Press RUSSERT: But your base conservatives, and listen to Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, they're all saying you are the biggest spender in American history.
BUSH: Well, they're wrong. If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.
Angry Bear has the facts: discretionary spending went waaaay up not steadily down every year of this Administration.
Now, if “gotcha” questions like the price of eggs or the capital of foreign countries were once big news, surely voluntarily mis-stating (or not knowing) a fairly basic fact about the trend line (forget knowing the dollar figure details, we're talking trends and gross effects here) about what one's own administrations budgets are like ought to be big news, shouldn't it?
Nope. The Miami Herald (running a Dana Milbank story from the Post) buried this in the last paragraphs of the story, and did it in a way that no one will understand that what Bush said wasn't true.
Bush said critics, including conservatives, are ''wrong'' to say he has not kept control of the federal budget. ''If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined,'' he said.
Federal discretionary spending has grown by more than 25 percent in the past two fiscal years, following average annual increases of 2.4 percent in discretionary spending in the 1990s, according to figures from congressional budget panels.
Note that without a lead-in like “In fact,” that second paragraph is going to be impenetrable to many readers…or at least won't jump out at them as a direct contradiction of the previous graph.
The error isn't mentioned at all in Elisabeth Bumiller's News Analysis of the speech, which is all about whether it was a good idea (isn't lying or demonstrating ignorance relevant to that?). Of course, that could be because she only read the New York Times article on the interview, in which Richard w. Stevenson doesn't mention this little detail at all.
Why isn't this issue more important than the fact that Bush re-stated many opinions we've heard before? Somehow, it's just not 'news”.
If this is the Big Lie, it's working. If this is a sign of a lack of contact with reality, this news coverage isn't going to bring reality any closer.
I am amazed that with all the realms of justified vitriol being poured on the Bush budget, no one has pointed out this budget revives the Washington Monument Ploy. Admittedly that's relatively traditional compared to:
The Washington Monument Ploy is an ancient device favored by executive branch budget makers. When required to meet some arduous budget number by producing cuts, the crafty bureaucrat proposes cuts to things that he knows Congress will never accept, such as closing the Washington Monument. Although this contributes nothing to good government, it does allow the executive branch to claim that the “budget-busting” comes from those irresponsible spenders in Congress.
How else to explain this?
Bush asks to cut decontamination research On the same day a poison-laced letter shuttered Senate offices, President Bush asked Congress to eliminate an $8.2 million research program on how to decontaminate buildings attacked by toxins.
Buried in documents justifying Bush's 2005 budget proposal released Monday is an Environmental Protection Agency acknowledgment that his proposed cut “represents complete elimination of homeland security building decontamination research.”
As far as I can tell, most of the stuff the Bush budget proposes to cut falls squarely in the Washington Monument category, except perhaps for the cuts that fall on the poorest Americans—there’s some chance that a Republican Congress might actually pass those.
The Senate Republicans will throw a senior aide to the wolves this week, in hopes of heading off inquiries into their personal complicity into Hackergate: Leak staffer ousted. Will it work? Much probably depends on what the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms reports when he concludes his investigation.
Wouldn't it be nicer to live in a world where the Senate's forms of civility were reflected in some reality?
If Sen Daschle, the vanishing Senate vanishing Minority Leader were to find his spine, it might look like this.
But of course instead we have to all sing along with this.
My brother's White House Briefing column today reports that Questions About Bush's Guard Service have “become a mainstream issue.” If it wasn't before, it is after this column, and the Post's fairly tame article by Lois Romano (assisted by the notorious Ceci Connolly, traveling with Kerry—expect him to be Gore'd any day now!—and researchers Don Puhlman and Lucy Shackelford in Washington).
I think these five, count them five, Post staffers all left out one fairly central point: GW Bush could presumably clear up this entire controversy in one minute, simply by authorizing the full release of his military records—something every major party candidate who was a verteran has done for the last few decades. Every single one, except GW Bush.
Who of course has nothing to hide.
Incidentally, I'd also like to know who had access to the records over the years, in case any documents are, say, missing, or contain serial numbers suggesting they were inserted out of sequence, both of which are allegations that are floating around. I'm sure the Pentagon keeps that sort of access record.
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