The whole world knows we "got taken for a ride," as the president of Poland says, on Iraq. But because Bush & Co. were as shocked as anyone at the absence of WMD, that's more in the category of grotesque hype than outright lie. The Medicare story is a clearer example of dishonesty and, yes, corruption at high levels. As former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's statements make clear, the lying about budget numbers began early in the administration, when the White House falsely claimed that the government could not use the surplus to further draw down the debt. It continued after 9/11, when an assistant Treasury secretary complained that the administration was squandering the national consensus by insisting on tax-cut projections that weren't real. But the most shocking deception took place in the run-up to the signing of the Medicare prescription-drug benefit on Christmas Eve.
Recall how that bill squeaked through Congress only after some heads were cracked. A retiring Republican from Michigan, Rep. Nick Smith, even charges that supporters of the bill offered him a bribe in the form of financial support for the political campaign of his son. The bill was priced at the time at $400 billion over 10 years. After the deed was done (the specifics of which amounted to a huge giveaway to the pharmaceutical and health-care industries), it came out that the real cost will be at least $551.5 billion—a difference of $150-plus billion that will translate into trillions over time. Now we learn that the Bush administration knew the truth beforehand and squelched it. Rick Foster, the chief actuary for Medicare, says he was told he would be fired if he passed along the higher estimates to Congress. "I'll fire him so fast his head will spin," Thomas Scully, then head of Medicare, said last June, according to an aide who has now gone public.
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As for Bush himself, there are only two possibilities, both bad. The first is that he never learned the true cost of one of the major policy initiatives of his presidency. If so, he was incompetent. The second, more plausible, alternative is that he simply chose the lower, more convenient number and didn't have any problem with the honest figures produced by the bureaucracy's getting "deep-sixed," as they used to say during Watergate.
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The Bush administration now has an old-fashioned credibility gap. If numbers are released saying that the economy is perking up, why should anyone believe them? After all, it counts hamburger flippers as manufacturing jobs. The context of the election only magnifies the issue. New Bush ads charge that Kerry wants to raise taxes by $900 billion. This is a made-up number; Kerry has no such proposal.
But even if he did, voters would not be able to take the Bush campaign's word on it, because its word is no longer good. The challenge for the Democrats is to resist the temptation to make their own phony claims, or to hype the usual petty distortions of politics into "lies." The truth is damaging enough.
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=41685
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