By: Russ Baker  

Mr. President, in the 2000 Presidential election you promised to enact policies of "compassionate conservatism", but you have failed to honor the classical definition of either term. Recently, some commentators have begun labeling the discrepancy between your professed policies and your actions a "credibility gap". But when promises and actions are so shockingly in conflict, a stronger term is warranted. On the objective evidence, Mr. President, we are forced to conclude that you are, put simply, a liar - and, given the particulars of the moment, a dangerous one at that. Many of our allies understand this better than we, and that is why they are facing you down.

You yourself have constantly (and justifiably) criticized Saddam Hussein for saying one thing but doing another. The time has come to hold you to the same standard.

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George Bush promised to revolutionize public education when he signed the No Child Left Behind Act last year. But his failure to finance the law properly has discouraged recession-strapped states from embracing it fully. His administration has further endangered the reform by emphasizing peripheral parts of the law that win points from religious conservatives while ignoring vital provisions. The Department of Education seems more interested in promoting prayer in the schools - and giving religious groups access to federal education dollars - than in pursuing the most crucial part of the reform, which is providing every child with a "highly qualified" teacher by 2006.

The federal government took the unusual step last month of warning schools that get federal aid for the poor that they could lose that money if they did not permit students to exercise "constitutionally protected prayer"...

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living."

- General Omar Bradley, in his speech to West Point cadets, 1952

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The top budget writers in Congress didn't intend it this way, but the budgets they unveiled last week offered graphic illustrations of the folly of President Bush's tax cuts. With their colleagues reeling from new assessments of the huge deficits that would be produced by the Bush economic plan, the chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees scrambled to come up with plans that showed an eventual return to balanced budgets. The two lawmakers chose different approaches, but both make clear that the tax cuts can't be paid for without significant spending cuts now or down the road.

In the Senate, Don Nickles (R-OK) accommodated most of the Bush tax cuts and still managed to show balance by 2013 largely through the time-honored trick of setting spending levels unreasonably low in the later years, when this year's budget plan will have been long forgotten. In the House, Jim Nussle (R-IA) adopted an even more aggressive approach that showed the budget in balance by 2010 (although this, like Mr. Nickles' proposal, includes a Social Security surplus once considered untouchable)...

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Whenever the Republicans find themselves in trouble on environmental issues, the call goes out for Frank Luntz, a respected party strategist. Back in 1995, Mr. Luntz urged the party to soften its language when it became clear that the Gingrich revolution had gone too far in its attacks on environmental law. Mr. Luntz is now making the same point. In a memorandum recently described by the Times' Jennifer B. Lee, he warns that after two years of regulatory rollbacks, environmental issues have become "the single biggest vulnerability for the Republicans and especially for George Bush".

Mr. Luntz's remedy is not to change the policy, but to dress it up with warm and fuzzy words. As in 1995, he says that the problem is one of communication, and that what must be done is to start using comforting words like "balance", "common sense", "safer", "cleaner", and "healthier".

"Court-appointed President Bush and Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Jose Maria Aznar of Spain will hold a pro-war, pre-war summit in the Azores on Sunday. Originally the meeting was planned for Corsica but was switched because Blair feared the British people would make him stay there."

- Barry Crimmins

By: Frederick H. Winterberg III  

With a potential war in Iraq taking up virtually all of the time on cable news shows, little attention is being paid to domestic issues such as the economy, unemployment, the stock market, and rising drug and medical costs. What little attention is paid to these pressing problems seems to center around the theme "when will the economy recover?", taking for granted that it will, in spite of the havoc Bushonomics has wreaked on all the aforementioned fronts. We see Bush touting a brand new tax cut for the rich, or an economic stimulus bill that relies on tax cuts for the rich and big business, and the talking heads speak reverentially of how great a leader Bush is, and how soon his worthless proposals will reverse the 2 year death spiral of our economy. It's always a question of "when" we will see recovery, not if, which prompted me to realize for the first time:

Bush and the Republicans don't want a recovery.

"To protect our freedoms, it seems we're going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time."

- Neil Young, proclaiming his support of the USA Patriot Act, Dec. 11, 2001

By: Bridget Gibson  

George W. Bush will officially become a dictator when he announces the United States of America's unilateral attack on the sovereign nation of Iraq.

Our Senate and Congressional representatives, for the most part, have granted dictatorial powers to the only President appointed by the United States Supreme Court as a result of a disputed election. Bush received a minority of the popular vote.

Today, we the people stand alone against our government. Not in revolution but in a diametrically opposed fashion. We stand without representation as surely as we did before our country was founded and declared its separation from the rule of King George of England.

By: Paul Krugman  

...There's a long list of pundits who previously supported Bush's policy on Iraq but have publicly changed their minds. None of them quarrel with the goal; who wouldn't want to see Saddam Hussein overthrown? But they are finally realizing that Mr. Bush is the wrong man to do the job. And more people than you would think - including a fair number of people in the Treasury Department, the State Department and, yes, the Pentagon - don't just question the competence of Mr. Bush and his inner circle; they believe that America's leadership has lost touch with reality.

If that sounds harsh, consider the debacle of recent diplomacy - a debacle brought on by awesome arrogance and a vastly inflated sense of self-importance.

Mr. Bush's inner circle seems amazed that the tactics that work so well on journalists and Democrats don't work on the rest of the world. They've made promises, oblivious to the fact that most countries don't trust their word. They've made threats. They've done the aura-of-inevitability thing - how many times now have administration officials claimed to have lined up the necessary votes in the Security Council? They've warned other countries that if they oppose America's will they are objectively pro-terrorist. Yet still the world balks.

"Did you see Bush's press conference? I don't want to say there's nothing new there, but at one point the closed captioning actually said 'blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.'... The President was so subdued and there were so many long pauses, the Washington Post suggested today that he may have been on drugs. Apparently we are seeing the side effects of a powerful codeine-based smirk inhibitor."

- Bill Maher

By: Maureen Dowd  

It will go down as a great mystery of history how Mr. Popularity at Yale metamorphosed into President Persona Non Grata of the world.

The genial cheerleader and stickball commissioner with the gregarious parents, the frat president who had little nicknames and jokes for everyone, fell in with a rough crowd.

Just when you thought it couldn't get more Strangelovian, it does. The Bush bullies, having driven off all the other kids in the international schoolyard, are now resorting to imaginary friends.

By: Joe Conason  

In the higher circles of the Bush Administration, investigative journalism is now regarded as a form of terrorism. At least that seemed to be the definition used by foreign policy adviser Richard Perle during an appearance yesterday on CNN, when he described New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh as a "terrorist". Toward the end of a routine war-promoting television appearance for Perle - during which he debated former Congressman Tom Andrews, national director of Win Without War - Wolf Blitzer asked him about an article by Hersh that explores Perle's private business activities.

Actually, Perle has no reason to complain about Hersh's article. The veteran journalist afforded him every opportunity to respond to questions about the conflicts of interest between his role as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a secretive group that advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his private business activities as a manager of an entity incorporated in Delaware and somewhat ominously known as Trireme Partners LP (For those who have forgotten their classics, the trireme was the ship of war whose invention allowed Athens to dominate the Mediterranean during the 5^th Century B.C.) Trireme, which also boasts connections with DPB member Henry Kissinger and Gerald Hillman, a New York businessman who also sits on the Pentagon board, invests in "companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense".

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The Bush administration's belated determination to enforce workplace safety rules against flagrant violators may be the best one can hope for from an administration that seems allergic to tight regulation of business. But the new enforcement policy falls short of what is truly needed.

The new policies were prompted by a recent New York Times series examining McWane Inc., a pipe manufacturer that has been cited for more than 400 safety violations since 1995, a period during which 4,600 workers were injured and 9 were killed; 3 of those deaths were caused by deliberate violations of federal safety standards. An inept response by regulators failed to halt the infractions.

By: Sheila Samples  

I don't know about you, but I'm hearing looney tunes from one end of this administration to the other - and all in the name of Jesus Christ. I want to stand up and shout: "Hey - I know Jesus Christ! Jesus is a friend of mine. And the guy you're hiding behind - the one you're wagging in everybody's face for political gain - is no Jesus Christ." But all I can do when Bush or his legions blaspheme the name of Jesus and order God - like an unbottled heavenly genie - to wreak Old Testament vengeance, is clap my hands over my ears, rock back and forth in agony, and burst into uncontrollable tears. How can Christians stand by, mute, and allow the world to be savagely sodomized, allow millions of innocents to be slaughtered - and allow it all to be blamed on the spotless and gentle risen Savior? How?

Having displayed neither the interest nor the ability to lead, it seems Dubya asks only that those who are actually in control allow him to be called the leader - a noble and self-righteous dictator, protecting his subjects, killing his way to peace. This seems little enough to ask, not only of those who control him, but of those who selected him for this high office...

By: Paul Krugman  

But what's really scary - what makes a fixed-rate mortgage seem like such a good idea - is the looming threat to the federal government's solvency.

That may sound alarmist: right now the deficit, while huge in absolute terms, is only 2 - make that 3, OK, maybe 4 - percent of GDP But that misses the point. "Think of the federal government as a gigantic insurance company (with a sideline business in national defense and homeland security), which does its accounting on a cash basis, only counting premiums and payouts as they go in and out the door. An insurance company with cash accounting... is an accident waiting to happen." So says the Treasury under secretary Peter Fisher; his point is that because of the future liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, the true budget picture is much worse than the conventional deficit numbers suggest.

Of course, Mr. Fisher isn't allowed to draw the obvious implication: that his boss's push for big permanent tax cuts is completely crazy. But the conclusion is inescapable. Without the Bush tax cuts, it would have been difficult to cope with the fiscal implications of an aging population. With those tax cuts, the task is simply impossible. The accident - the fiscal train wreck - is already under way.

By: Gordon Solberg  

Let me say right at the beginning that I believe in equal opportunity regime change - depose Saddam, and impeach Bush. The world would then be a better place.

Americans are hungry for a positive vision. We want to leave a habitable planet for our children and grandchildren. We want renewable energy, so that we can finally be free from the curse of oil. We want to have fair and honest elections for a change. We want a country with a level playing field for rich and poor alike. A country where we aren't manipulated to hate and fear each other.

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Oil was discovered on the North Slope in 1968. The area has since supplied about 20% of America's domestic production, but at considerable environmental cost. The reproductive rates of certain bird species, including snow geese, eiders, and some shorebirds, have declined. Female caribou are producing fewer calves, while offshore seismic activity has driven whales out to sea and beyond the hunting range of native communities. The report also says that thousands of acres of tundra vegetation have been destroyed and that "wilderness values" - a broader term encompassing solitude and scenic qualities - have been compromised in a much larger area. The problem has not been the individual wells but associated infrastructure, like roads, pipelines, and housing.

None of this is likely to deter Congressional proponents of drilling in the refuge's coastal plain, an undisturbed 1.5-million-acre wilderness that cannot be drilled without specific authorization by Congress. Nor is it likely to deter Gale Norton, the Secretary of the Interior, who has lately been quite busy searching for oil elsewhere in Alaska...

"Do not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or well-educated."

- Dallas, TX, prosecutors 'manual', used until the mid-1970's

By: William Raspberry  

Sometimes our approach to Iraq takes on a sort of Strangelove quality. That is, in order to accomplish the perfectly rational goal of disarming Saddam Hussein, President Bush has to give a convincing impression of a crazy man - a Texas-tough megalomaniac who will let nothing shake him from his war-bound course. But the strategy works only if Bush assumes the Iraqi madman is rational enough to know when he's been outbluffed.

The fear is that one (or both) of these men will overplay his hand and hurl us into a war no sane person could want and whose most serious casualties could come after the bombing stops. How did we come to such a pass?

Bruce Jentleson, who is unusually smart about such things, thinks at least part of the explanation lies in the syllogism that seems to drive the thinking of the President, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,and Rumsfeld's top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz...

"I don't believe we need conservative judges or liberal judges or anything but patriotic American judges who will enforce the laws and the Constitution of the United States. Our courts should never be the wholly owned subsidiaries of any one political party, any one point of view, any one ideology or any one President."

- Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)

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The Children's Internet Protection Act requires that libraries receiving federal aid for Internet access install filters that block material considered obscene or, in the case of underage users, "harmful to minors". Libraries regard the law as an infringement on their ability to provide information freely to their users. They say it requires them to use software that erroneously blocks access to many inoffensive sites. A group of libraries sued, and last year, a three-judge court unanimously held the law unconstitutional.

It is clear that the software being forced on libraries prevents their patrons from seeing a large amount of constitutionally protected material. By one estimate, it "overblocks" by 15% or more, meaning that untold hundreds of thousands of websites that should be accessible to library users are not. The trial court found that the software blocked the websites of political candidates and sites discussing such topics as sexual identity and abstinence.

By: Mike Leonard  

...the FBI said the plane carried no electronic surveillance equipment and its occupants were merely eyeballing the landscape below.

How effective could that possibly be?

Of course, this explanation comes from a wing of a federal government that announced it planned to lie and plant disinformation stories in the war on terrorism. The same government that then backtracked and said it wasn't going to do that - immediately raising the question: "Are they lying now?"

In truth, American citizens have every reason to view strange phenomena with a watchful eye. Foreign students at Indiana University, particularly from Middle Eastern countries, are being approached and interviewed by FBI agents, not for probable cause but because of their country of origin.

"That event last night deserved to be called a 'press conference' about as much as Bush deserves to be called 'President'."

- Barry Crimmins, about Dubya's press conference in the White House, Mar. 6, 2003

By: Mike McArdle  

His cluelessness was positively frightening and his demeanor was insulting. On maybe the last occasion on which he would try to explain to those he allegedly serves why this war is necessary and why now he could only drone on in an absurd monotone that suggested sedation or alcohol use or simply a desire to dispense with the niceties of having to explain himself to the rest of us. He called out the name of the next questioner so quickly that it often sounded like the last words of his answer to the previous question. He wanted out of there as quickly as possible.

Nobody wants to say, and I'm sure that nobody wants to believe, that the President is a mindless zombie ready to hurl the world into a possible planet-wide cataclysm with next to no thought and little understanding of the consequences but maybe somebody had better say something. We should all hope that he was drunk or sedated because if he wasn't then the person who has his finger on the nuke-yoo-lar trigger is a simple-minded fool with no understanding of his role on the world stage or the power over life and death that is at his command.

By: Molly Ivins  

Our Texas, all hail the mighty state! Gov. 'Good Hair' Perry has promised to use $10 million of state money to help map the bovine genome, the genetic code of a cow, a project to be carried out at Baylor and Texas A&M. Through a bureaucratic fubar, the Texas Department of Health failed to spend $12.5 million of the money it had budgeted to take care of the most desperately ill poor children in this state. Children with cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, spina bifida, and heart problems were put on a waiting list - 1,400 of them - because the department thought the program was about to go broke.

As Clay Robison of the Houston Chronicle pointed out in a fine column, this should have been a no-brainer. Great, we've got 12.5 more than we thought we had for desperately ill children. Hurray!

Nope. Because the money didn't get spent, it has been declared "surplus" and is being treated as part of the Health Department's contribution to solving our $9.9 billion state deficit...

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Attention Dick Cheney's lawyers: This week the Top Ten Conservative Idiots features some first-rate lowbrow humor at the expense of your boss and his wife, and we're really hoping to receive one of those cool letters like you sent to that other website. (Send us an email if you need our mailing address.) To everyone out there who isn't a lawyer for Dick Cheney, we've got even more conservative idiot fun... George W. Bush (2) held a press conference but didn't actually answer any questions. MSNBC (4) is packing its TV schedule with right-wing extremists. Regent University (5) is building a bridge to the Fourteenth Century. And Colin Powell (10) took a break from warmongering for a little anti-gay fearmongering. Enjoy.

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions... possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party."

- John Adams

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