I'm sure someone will explain to me why this report from Knight-Ridder's Tony Pugh, is really another sterling example of the integrity and trustworthiness of the Bush administration:
The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.
When the House of Representatives passed the controversial benefit by five votes last November, the White House was embracing an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that it would cost $395 billion in the first 10 years. But for months the administration's own analysts in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had concluded repeatedly that the drug benefit could cost upward of $100 billion more than that.
Withholding the higher cost projections was important because the White House was facing a revolt from 13 conservative House Republicans who'd vowed to vote against the Medicare drug bill if it cost more than $400 billion.
(via Josh Marshall)
Here come the e-mails from people in high dudgeon, shocked and appalled and dismayed. They are not morally offended because the administration threatened to fire someone if he told the truth. They are not morally offended because the administration misled the public and members of its own party in Congress in order to get its Medicare bill passed. They are morally offended that critics of the administration like myself would dare to point out that Pres. George W. Bush and his administration are not trustworthy.
"Liberals think Bush is a liar," writes Slate's William Saletan. "It isn't true."
Saletan then goes on to offer a complicated explanation of how Bush can say so many things that aren't true without actually, technically, lying. This complex, tortured psychoanalysis is purely speculative, but Saletan may be right. Who knows? Who cares? It's utterly beside the point.
Saletan and the "liberals" he derides are dealing with the same set of facts, the same ever-growing body of statements from Bush and his administration that cannot be reconciled with reality. If some critics believe these statements are most easily explained by the thesis "Bush lies," it's not because they're driven by an irrational hatred of the president, but by a devotion to Ockham's Razor. Saletan's sensitivities prevent him from ever accusing a president of mendacity, so instead he questions the president's sanity. (Like this is better?)
All these speculative theories are, again, not the main point. The undeniable, overwhelming fact is that — for whatever reason — the Bush administration is not trustworthy.
Why this is so matters far less that the fact that this is so. Pugh's report on the Medicare fiasco is just another "Day at the Races."
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