Kevin Drum notices yet another big Bush Administration lie:
Posted by DeLong at September 15, 2003 02:58 PM | TrackBackCalPundit: Yet More Lies: David Corn today:
September is back-to-school time, and Bush hit the road to promote his education policies. During a speech at a Nashville elementary school, he hailed his education record by noting that "the budget for next year boosts funding for elementary and secondary education to $53.1 billion. That's a 26-percent increase since I took office. In other words, we understand that resources need to flow to help solve the problems."
A few things were untrue in these remarks. Bush's proposed elementary and secondary education budget for next year is $34.9 billion, not $53.1 billion, according to his own Department of Education. It's his total proposed education budget that is $53.1 billion. More importantly, there is no next-year "boost" in this budget. Elementary and secondary education received $35.8 billion in 2003. Bush's 2004 budget cuts that back nearly a billion dollars, and the overall education spending in his budget is the same as the 2003 level.
Keep in mind that this was a prepared speech, not some off the cuff remarks, so this was a deliberate lie, not a casual mistake.
At long last, the anti-Bush forces seem to have finally settled on a single theme: He lies. His advisors lie. A lot. About everything.
And this is true. In some sense, the remarkable thing about the Bush administration is not what they do — after all, other administrations have cut taxes, busted unions, and gone to war — but the fact that they tell so many baldfaced lies about what they do. Thanks to yeoman work from the likes of Al Franken, Joe Conason, Paul Krugman, David Corn, and others, this storyline is starting to become conventional wisdom, and I think the Democratic candidates should start picking up on it and hammering it home. If they repeat it often enough, the Bushies are going to end up on the ropes. Americans don't like liars.
Oh, and one more thing: aside from plain old, ordinary, garden variety lies — of which they have plenty — I've noticed that the Bushies have a real specialty in one particular kind of lie. More on that some other time.
You mean that the President and his advisors are a bunch of lying liars who lie a lot?
Unfortunately, the American people need to be told things A LOT. The lying liar Bush seems to be able to stay "on message" while he is being a lying liar; most Dems, unfortunately, have to break every so often to pay attention to what is going on around them. This is endearing, but I think its a mistake. So let's stay on message.
Bush is a lying liar who lies a lot. And Dick Cheney-- HE'S a lying liar who does NOTHING but lie... a lot. Don Rumsfeld is a maniac lying liar who lies a lot...
Posted by: the talking dog on September 15, 2003 03:30 PMOn education spending, the bulk is done by state and local governments. www.bea.doc.gov data goes only through 2001. Does anyone know what has recently happened to TOTAL government spending on education (as in 2002) and maybe on what the 2003 forecasts are?
Posted by: Hal McClure on September 15, 2003 06:15 PMKevin Drum is quoted as writing:
Thanks to yeoman work from the likes of Al Franken, Joe Conason, Paul Krugman, David Corn, and others,
Among the others I'd like to highlight Bob Somerby, whose incomparable Daily Howler site (to which this site links) is a continuing source of meticulous documentation of lying from the administration and especially the media.
Posted by: Jonathan Goldberg on September 15, 2003 06:38 PMIs is truly a lie or are Mr. Bush and his writers so disengaged from the policy that they don't understand it or recognize when it is wrongly characterized? Most dittoheads don't understand a lot but they reliably repeat what they are told.
Posted by: bakho on September 15, 2003 07:39 PMno, it's an attempt to finesse the truth. the numbers that are reported are accurate, if you change the words in the sentences that surround them.
of course, that can be said about a number of lies, but I think this one is designed to be defensible. you know, like in the old days, "what Mr. Reagan meant to say was.."
Yesterday I read an article in the suppopedly liberal NY Times which implied that Howard Dean is not such a straight shooter after all, because in 1995 he called himself a "strong supporter" of NAFTA, and now he says he was just a supporter, not a strong supporter.
I'm still waiting for mainstream articles about Bush's many, many, lies.
Posted by: rps on September 16, 2003 06:16 AM"Thanks to yeoman work from the likes of Al Franken, Joe Conason, Paul Krugman, David Corn, and others, this storyline is starting to become conventional wisdom, and I think the Democratic candidates should start picking up on it and hammering it home."
Yes, and it should work just as well against Bush as it did against Clinton. Jiminy, didn't the Dems learn *anything* from the impeachment debacle? The subject of that process actually *did* lie and he emerged just as strong, if not stronger. I wonder if Franke, Conason, et al aren't just Rove plants...
Posted by: Tongue Boy on September 16, 2003 08:45 AMAh yes tongue boy, but there is a difference here. Clinton lied about a personal affair, while the Bush team is lying about policy. It's one thing to claim you didn't get a blow job from an intern. It's another thing to claim Iraq is about to give nukes to OBL which will end up in a city near you soon....
Posted by: The Nameless One on September 16, 2003 08:54 AM