Daily Howler: How will major pundits respond to yesterday’s lies by George Bush?

KING OF THE LIARS—GEORGE BUSH: Has there ever been a bald-faced liar to match George W. Bush? At yesterday’s forum on Social Security, the president told a series of dumb, stupid jokes for an audience of perfectly decent Americans. And then he lied right in their faces. Incredibly, their president told them this:

BUSH (1/11/05): As a matter of fact, by the time today’s workers who are in their mid-20s begin to retire, the system will be bankrupt. So if you’re 20 years old, in your mid-20s, and you’re beginning to work, I want you to think about a Social Security system that will be flat bust, bankrupt, unless the United States Congress has got the willingness to act now.

And that’s what we’re here to talk about, a system that will be bankrupt.

“As a matter of fact,” Bush said, without irony, before he offered these bald-faced lies to the decent folks watching him speak.

What is wrong with Bush’s statement? Workers who are in their mid-20s will, by and large, begin to retire shortly after the year 2040. And will Social Security be “bankrupt—flat bust,” as their joke-cracking president said? Sorry. According to the CBO, the system will still pay full scheduled benefits until the year 2052. After that, will SS be “flat bust?” No, it will not, as Bush knows. After 2052, the system will be able to pay 81 percent of scheduled benefits. Even adjusted for inflation, those benefits will be far more than SS recipients are getting today.

Understand: If no changes are made to the system, recipients will get substantially more in 2052 than recipients are getting today! But incredibly, your lying president tells decent citizens that the system will instead be “flat bust!” And by the way: Even according to the pessimistic forecasts of the SS trustees, the system won’t be “bankrupt, flat bust” when young workers start to retire. According to the trustees’ gloomy projections, the system will pay full benefits until 2042. It will then pay 73 percent of scheduled benefits, more than recipients get today.

CNN.com – Official: U.S. ends search for WMD in Iraq – Jan 12, 2005

U.S. inspectors have ended their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in recent weeks, a U.S. intelligence official told CNN.

The search ended almost two years after President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, citing concerns that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction and may have hidden weapons stockpiles.

Forget about WMDs (and the lies and errors). Now we are on to the real crisis of Social Security! mjh

The Poor Man: Compare and Contrast
Rathergate vs. Saddam’s WMD – A Quantitative Comparison

[including]
Cost to American taxpayer $0.00 vs ~$150,000,000,000 (as of 1/12/05)
Number of American soldiers killed as a result 0 vs 1,357 (as of 1/12/05)

GOP leaders display arrogance BY ROBERT NOVAK

‘We are looking more and more like the Democrats we replaced,” a House committee chairman told me Wednesday. That comment came before he learned, to his surprise and sorrow, that the House Republican leadership had removed Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey as chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. The extraordinary purge buttressed the growing impression of arrogance as Republicans enter their second decade of power in the House.

[Two] disparate moves are united by a common purpose of making decisions from the top down. Smith was a chairman who did not take orders. The defeated spending reforms came from conservatives outside the leadership. …

[T]he new majority party resembles the old one in this sense: having long been in power, they act as though they are sure they will keep it forever. …

Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the other members of the Steering Committee wanted to purge Smith two years ago for defying the leadership on veterans spending, but Speaker J. Dennis Hastert saved him. This year, the pressure was so great that he was kicked off the committee. …

The new Appropriations Committee chairman, Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, is expected to be more attentive to the leaders than were his predecessors, whether or not he is a less open-handed spender. Smith’s fate suggests Lewis will be well-advised not to stray too far from what his leaders want.

Opinion > For the Record on Social Security” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/10/opinion/10mon1.html?ex=1263099600&en=24a380642da9ba1b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>The New York Times > Opinion > For the Record on Social Security

Late February is now the time frame mentioned by the White House for unveiling President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. The timing is no accident. By waiting until then, the president will conveniently avoid having to include the cost of privatization – as much as $2 trillion in new government borrowing over the next 10 years – in his 2006 budget, expected in early February.

In this and other ways, the administration is manipulating information – a tacit, yet devastating, acknowledgement, we believe, that an informed public would reject privatizing Social Security. For the record:

The administration has suggested that it would be justified in borrowing some $2 trillion to establish private accounts because doing so would head off $10 trillion in future Social Security liabilities. It’s bad enough that the $10 trillion is a highly inflated figure, intended to overstate a problem that is reasonably estimated at $3.7 trillion or even considerably less. Worse are the true dimensions of the administration’s proposed ploy, which were made painfully clear in a memo that was leaked to the press last week. Written in early January by Peter Wehner, the president’s director of strategic initiatives and a top aide to Karl Rove, the president’s political strategist, the memo states unequivocally that under a privatized system, only drastic benefit cuts – not borrowing – would relieve Social Security’s financial problem. “If we borrow $1-2 trillion to cover transition costs for personal savings accounts” without making benefit cuts, Mr. Wehner wrote, “we will have borrowed trillions and will still confront more than $10 trillion in unfunded liabilities. This could easily cause an economic chain reaction: the markets go south, interest rates go up, and the economy stalls out.”

At a recent press conference, Mr. Bush exaggerated the timing of the system’s shortfall by saying that Social Security would cross the “line into red” in 2018. According to Congress’s budget agency, the system comes up short in 2052; according to the system’s trustees, the date is 2042. The year 2018 is when the system’s trustees expect they will have to begin dipping into the Social Security trust fund to pay full benefits. If you had a trust fund to pay your bills when your income fell short, would you consider yourself insolvent?

Why is Bush pulling an ‘Iraq’ on us and overstating/lying about the ‘crisis’? I thought it might just be a generous gift to his supporters in the financial industry. That seems more practical that a desire to eradicate FDR’s legacy — which surely motivates some of the deeper thinkers on the Right.

Now I realize it is an essential step in ‘starving the beast’ (destroying the Federal Government economically). Because the opposite of what Bush claims is true: there’s too much money in Social Security and that enables lots of legislation. So, cut the inflows by 66% and create the crises you claim is already coming. Now Congress doesn’t have so much extra money to play with and the Federal Government is stifled. Or, Democrats elected in response to the all the things Bush is doing wrong are forced to raise taxes and the Republican can spew the same old lines that have served them so well for so long. mjh

Read the rest of the Times editorial.
Continue reading Right on Iraq, Right on SS? →

CNN.com – Gingrich doesn’t rule out presidential run – Jan 9, 2005

Republicans close to Gingrich said he privately has mused about potentially running for president in 2008 or beyond. These officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Gingrich would not approve of public speculation, said odds are against him seeking and winning the White House.

If nothing else, they said, Gingrich understands that talk could help sell his book, which goes on sale Monday.

Gingrich Finds God in Washington (washingtonpost.com)

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich says he “got fed up with people who argue that somehow the concept of the creator wasn’t central to how the Founding Fathers understood America.” So in a book being published today, he includes a 19-page “Walking Tour of God in Washington, D.C.,” cataloging references to the Bible, Moses and a heavenly father on the Capitol, monuments and memorials.

“In the last 30 years, you had this politically correct delegitimizing of God in American public life, which I think is a denial of the core of American civilization,” he said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Daily Howler

If you watch the propaganda mill euphemistically known as the Fox News Channel, you may not have the slightest idea why Armstrong Williams is in hot water. On Friday night’s O’Reilly Factor, then on Sunday’s Fox & Friends, the channel’s stars let Williams pretend that he had simply taken money to run legitimate TV/radio ads about the No Child Left Behind program. By Friday morning, it was clear that Williams had been paid to do far more than that. But his Fox hosts stared into air, letting Williams pretend he was being slammed for a “perfectly legitimate” ad buy. …

[B]y Sunday, when Williams did Fox & Friends, the deception was total and repetitive. In the course of a nine-minute interview, Williams kept framing the issue in terms of selling ad time, mentioning nothing else for which he’d been paid. And his three Fox hosts went along with the sham. …

[A]t no time in the nine-minute session did anyone note that Williams was paid for more than a simple ad buy. And Williams kept pimping the bogus idea that the flap concerned nothing but legitimate ads.

Over and over (and over and over), Williams kept pretending that he was only paid to run legitimate ads. And none of his three Fox hosts ever tried to correct or challenge him. Indeed, by the end of the session, the hosts had reached new ground in their open pandering, agreeing with Williams when he said he was being held to “a higher standard than anyone else.”

Was Williams paid to pimp for Bush? Yes. But then, these hosts are paid to pimp for Williams! They know what Roger Ailes pays them to do, and they delivered on Sunday like cash machines. “God bless you,” one host said to Williams as The Three Storeboughts signed off.

So anyone who depends upon Fox as their primary ‘news’ source concludes this is much ado about nothing, oblivious to the government buying propaganda to mislead the public in violation of federal law. mjh

Welcome to uExpress featuring Richard Reeves — The Best Advice and Opinions The Universe!

The harshest words and judgments came from Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.

Speaking of Gonzales’ role in the formulation of new and deeply disturbing U.S. policy on torture in war, on the defining and treatment of prisoners taken or seized in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on our holding pens at Guantanamo, Graham was direct and focused. He was the one who said, without fancy words or legalisms, that Gonzales had played a crucial role in “creating legal chaos,” in “putting our troops in jeopardy” and in “losing the moral high ground.”

“I do believe we have lost our way,” said Graham. …

Gonzales lost me in the third paragraph of his opening statement: “The Department of Justice’s top priority is to prevent terror attacks against our nation.”

I don’t agree with that — and neither does history. The office of attorney general, created by the Judiciary Act of 1789, was a one-man operation to prosecute lawsuits before the Supreme Court, which was created by the same act. Times change. The Justice Department now has 112,000 employees and multiple tasks. Obviously fighting terrorism is one of them, a priority of all the government. It is the top priority of the new Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed many duties (particularly immigration control) that were once delegated to Justice. Perhaps fighting terrorism could be considered the top priority of the Department of Defense these days, or even of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a small part of the Justice Department.

But the Justice Department’s priority should be “justice,” or as it officially defines its own role: “to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.” …

The best analogy to these times in our history might be the excesses of World War I and its aftermath, which climaxed with the Palmer Raids from 1919 to 1921.

Alexander Mitchell Palmer, a former congressman who was President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, arrested and detained without charge more than 15,000 people on suspicion of being communists or anarchists or whatever. Socialist elected public officials were arbitrarily removed from office. A clothing salesman in Connecticut was thrown in jail for six months because someone overheard him saying he thought Lenin was very smart. And things got worse after an anarchist blew himself up in front of Palmer’s house.

Palmer made terrorism his top priority and ended up disgracing the Justice Department. I find it hard to believe Gonzales is as foolish and dangerous as Palmer was. But he has lost his way. Our new nominee was fool enough, or blindly loyal enough to his president, to clumsily argue that torture and secret detention were necessary now to keep America free — all in the name of justice.
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[via m-pyre]

“Promoting Torture’s Promoter”
By BOB HERBERT
January 7, 2005

The Bush administration hasn’t changed. This is an administration that believes it can do and say whatever it wants, and that attitude is changing the very nature of the United States. It is eroding the checks and balances so crucial to American-style democracy. It led the U.S., against the advice of most of the world, to launch the dreadful war in Iraq. It led Mr. Gonzales to ignore the expressed concerns of the State Department and top military brass as he blithely opened the gates for the prisoner abuse vehicles to roll through.

There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence. In the Bush administration, that mixture has been explosive. Forget the meant-to-be-comforting rhetoric surrounding Mr. Gonzales’s confirmation hearings. Nothing’s changed. As detailed in The Washington Post earlier this month, the administration is making secret plans for the possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists who will never even be charged.

Due process? That’s a laugh. Included among the detainees, the paper noted, are hundreds of people in military or C.I.A. custody “whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts.” And there will be plenty more detainees to come.

Who knows who these folks are or what they may be guilty of? We’ll have to trust in the likes of Alberto Gonzales or Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush’s new appointee to head the C.I.A., Porter Goss, to see that the right thing is done in each and every case.

Americans have tended to view the U.S. as the guardian of the highest ideals of justice and fairness. But that is a belief that’s getting more and more difficult to sustain. If the Justice Department can be the fiefdom of John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales, those in search of the highest standards of justice have no choice but to look elsewhere.

It’s more fruitful now to look overseas. Last month Britain’s highest court ruled that the government could not continue to indefinitely detain foreigners suspected of terrorism without charging or trying them. One of the justices wrote that such detentions “call into question the very existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been very proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention.”

That’s a sentiment completely lost on an Alberto Gonzales or George W. Bush.