It's been a rough stretch lately for President Bush. John Kerry is ahead of him in some polls. The Meet the Press session didn't go over any better than the State of the Union did. The Sept. 11 commission won't take "no" for an answer. The Valerie Plame investigation could lead to criminal charges for White House staff. And the embarrassing details of his sketchy history with the National Guard (and his even more dubious history with an apparently segregationist campaign in Alabama) seem like they're going to become public.
And now, to top it all off, there's a new barrage of "gutter politics": someone is accusing President Bush of being disingenuous when he passed his signature tax-cut legislation.
The president's accuser says the so-called sunset provisions written into these tax cuts were nothing more than a shady bookkeeping trick — the sort of thing Enron and Worldcom got in so much trouble for. His accuser suggests that he never intended for these sunsets actually to occur — that he was flat out lying about the revenue reduction they would therefore produce in 6 to 10 years as the most explosively expensive portions of these tax cuts kick in without the purported expiration. This accuser even seems to suggest that the Bush White House broke with precedent by producing a short-term, 5-year budget, rather than the customary 10-year budget, simply to hide this duplicitous accounting, to prevent the public from seeing that these sunsets were nothing more than a sham — a flimsy excuse to allow the administration to pretend the fiscal disaster it was creating was actually in control, that spiraling deficits might someday end when the "stimulus" of these term-limited tax cuts was allowed to expire as agreed upon.
Who is this nefarious accuser? Who is accusing our president of cooking the books?
George W. Bush, that's who.
Here he was speaking yesterday in Harrisburg, Pa.:
The tax cuts are making a difference, but, unfortunately, they are set to expire, which means if Congress doesn't renew the tax cuts, the child credit will go down. So, in other words, if you're now getting a bigger child credit because you're a mom or a dad, you're going to pay more taxes. It's a tax increase. The marriage penalty will go up if Congress doesn't act. In other words, they'll be raising your taxes. In order to make sure people can find work or retain a job, we need to make the tax cuts permanent. There needs to be certainty in the tax code. People need to be able to plan. Small businesses need to be able to plan. Individuals need to be able to plan. We do not need a tax increase right now in our country.
Our great and noble president carefully and prudently designed his tax cuts to expire — thus preventing an ongoing and escalating fiscal nightmare and burdening our children and grandchildren with ever more debt. By describing this wise and fully intended expiration of a short-term stimulus plan as "a tax increase," that scoundrel W. sullies the name of our honorable president.
It's time for us to get beyond gutter politics. It's time for people like George W. Bush to stop accusing the president of lying.
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