The Bush Economic Miracle -- The Deficit

From the New York Sun:

2004 - $413 billion
2005 - $318 billion
2006 - $248 billion
2007 - $205 billion

The New York Times's Paul Krugman, in December, wrote that President Bush "plunged the budget deep into deficit by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains even as he took the country into a disastrous war." Senator Clinton went to the Senate floor in February of this year to speak of the "fiscal recklessness" of the Bush administration, which she charged had contributed to "record deficits." In March, Senator Schumer, who is now the chairman of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, spoke of "budget excesses of the past six years" that have brought us "a mounting debt to the rest of the world."

But as the shrinking figures above show, in fact the deficit is shrinking. When you look at it as a percentage of GDP, the decline is even more striking:

2004 - 3.6%
2005 - 2.6%
2006 - 1.9%
2007 - 1.5%

As the mid-session review released yesterday by President Bush's Office of Management and Budget says, the 1.5% of GDP figure is well below the 40-year average of 2.4%. It's also smaller than the deficit was in the first three years of the Clinton administration. The deficit numbers would be even better but for the war, though it is costing only $12 billion a month.

Read it here.

Once again the left is systematically misrepresenting the plain facts regarding important policy issues. It is they, not the President, who deserve to be suffering a "credibility gap."

Lies Of the Left -- The Plame Affair

Robert Novak in his new book, The Prince of Darkness, 50 Years of Reporting in Washington, has finally opened up about his role in the Valerie Plame affair. Washington Whispers has an advance copy and notes several interesting points.

1) Joe Wilson is an "asshole" [well..., we already knew that].

Novak entered the normally quiet green room only to see Joe Wilson (whom he didn't know) boasting about his fact-finding mission to Niger, where he found no evidence that Saddam Hussein was hunting for uranium like the president claimed about in his State of the Union address.

"He kept saying, 'We did this' and 'We did that.' The 'we,' I soon surmised, consisted of the National Security Council staff in the departed Clinton administration. He was making clear that 'we' handled affairs better than 'they'--the Bush NSC--did now. In view of what followed, I hope I can be excused for the vulgarism that crossed my mind: 'What an asshole!'"

2) And he is a liar [something we also knew] An offhand comment by Richard Armitage was the source of the leak. It was not a deliberately planted leak by the administration as alleged by Wilson.

3) David Corn of the Nation fabricated the notion that the administration was using Novak as a conduit for leaks.

4) Timothy Phelps of Newsday originated and left-wing journalists endlessly repeated the false accusation that Novak had said in an interview that his sources had come to him with the information on Plame. Novak never said any such thing.

5) The Washington Post published false allegations that the administration had been "shopping around" the Plame story and that they claimed her to be "fair game" because of Wilson's attacks.

There's more. Read the Whispers account here.

So, left-wing writers and publications cooked up false allegations regarding Novak and the administration and these lies eventually were picked up by respectable organs like the WaPo, being accepted as common wisdom in the Washington journalistic community.

Once more, after the damage has been done, to the President, to the nation, and to innocent individuals, we learn that it was yet another pack of lefty lies. These creeps will literally say or do anything to damage this administration. Oh well, anything for "the cause."

Faugh!

Setting the Record Straight -- Mission Accomplished

Another in the ongoing series, "The Lies of the Left"

Four years ago President Bush made a memorable speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. It was a splendid photo op at a time when things were going well in Iraq. Bush appeared heroic in his flight suit. Democrats felt they had to nullify the impact of the occasion, and with the help of a compliant MSM, succeeded in turning it into a joke. Don Surber revisits the moment and notes just how dishonestly it has been reported.

He writes:

Instead of just saying, "mission accomplished," I wish the commander-in-chief had been more realistic.

I wish Bush had said, "We have difficult work to do in Iraq."

I wish Bush had said, "We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous."

I wish Bush said, "Our mission continues. Al-Qaida is wounded, not destroyed. The scattered cells of the terrorist network still operate in many nations, and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people."

Of course, that is exactly what President Bush said on May 1, 2003. He did not just say "mission accomplished" and go home. He said one battle had been won.

In fact -- and journalists should try to deal with facts -- Bush did not even say, "mission accomplished," at all. That was on a banner behind him.

What he did say was, "The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq."

Quite different from what people think he said, and the disparity is deliberate. Bush has always had a realistic sense of what was needed and what could be accomplished with regard to the war on terror. He never tried to sell people on the idea that the journey would be quick and easy or that it would not require sacrifice. But his opponents, both cynics and wild-eyed ideologues, have insisted that he lied.

He didn't lie -- his critics did and are still doing so. Surber's right: journalists should stick to the facts, but in today's politicized media environment that is probably too much to ask.

Read Surber's piece here.

More Lies Of the Left -- The Patriotism Canard

Time and again Democrats have complained that the White House was trying to squelch debate by questioning the patriotism of war critics. Well, the Economist has checked out those complaints and found them to be baseless.

There seems to be a White House rule that officials are to avoid any mention of patriotism while vehemently attacking critics of the war. The Google searches I ran brought up only instances of Democrats attacking the White House with such language. In fact, the White House takes pains to say it's not questioning anyone’s patriotism.

What is actually going on is that Democrats are trying to squelch debate by claiming that anyone who criticizes them is unfairly questioning their patriotism. Once again the Democrats issue a big lie and it is uncritically accepted by the MSM.

As the Economist puts it,

I fail to see any hypocrisy in the White House saying to Democrats, "Your intentions are decent, but your ideas are rubbish."

Indeed.

Read the post here.

Andrew Klaven on the Lies of the Left

Andrew Klaven has a wonderful piece in the City Journal on the social costs and personal benefits of being a conservative.

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.

Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.

This is leftism’s great strength: it’s all white lies. That’s its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they’re installed. But because it depends on—indeed is defined by—describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence—he’s not crippled, dear, he’s handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s redeployment—leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.

Read the whole thing here.

"Bush Lied" is a Lie

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the mainstream press over the lack of civility in today's politics. Dinesh D'Souza correctly notes that such incivility usually results when the values and rhetoric of fringe groups enter the mainstream of political discourse. This is what happened when the Left's charge that "Bush lied" was adopted by mainstream Democrats.

If you want to know how the Iraq debate got so acrimonious, the tipping point was when mainstream Democrats went from accusing Bush of bungling the Iraq war to accusing him of lying to get America into that war. His crime, at this point, became not merely one of error but one of deliberate deception. The basic liberal reasoning is that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, therefore Bush has been misleading the American people all along.

At one time these charges of lying were restricted to the political left. In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, The Nation claimed that Bush went to war based on “falsehoods and deceptions.” Al Franken took the charge a step further, alleging that “the President loves to lie.” Activist Cindy Sheehan insisted, “My son died for lies. George Bush lied to us and he knew he was lying.”

But of late even mainstream Democrats have started to talk this way.

Read it here.

Dinesh has a point, a good one. Accusations that "Bush lied" are unfounded and poison the political atmosphere. Like many other presidents before him, Bush made a tough decision based in part on information that turned out to be wrong, but there is no evidence to support any contention that he acted in bad faith. To argue that he did so is itself a despicable lie promulgated by left-wing loons.

The willingness of main-stream Democrats to engage, as a matter of political expediency, in such calumny is not only disappointing. It undermines the entire political process and promotes the kind of vitriolic discourse that so many decry.