Shutting off the money-tap

The curtain is about to fall on the folly of "paying for" two wars with tax-cuts and off-budget appropriations. When the Democrats take over in three short weeks, the piecemeal way these wars have been prosecuted will come to an end. Congress is going to look at where exactly the $2 Billion dollars a week that Iraq is costing is actually going.

(Can I take a moment here and clamor - yet again - for an investigative body along the lines of the Truman Committee to investigate war profiteering?)

In a strong overture that they intend to exercise tight control over the power of the purse, the incoming Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees indicated that they would be demanding a better accounting of the war’s cost. They also stated their intent to move toward integrating the spending into the regular federal budget, which will put the war costs in the budget. Thus far, they have been hidden and the war has been fought on resolutions. The Three Card Monte method of war financing is done. Vice is shutting down the corner.

Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the incoming chairmen of the Budget Committes in their respective chambers have been blunt in stating that the administration’s approach of paying for extended military combat operations and related combat support activities through a seemingly endless series of "emergency requests" had inhibited Congressional scrutiny of the spending and had effectively hidden the true price of the war.

“They have been playing hide-the-ball,” Mr. Conrad said, “and that does not serve the Congress well nor the country well, and we are not going to continue that practice.”

Mr. Spratt, who along with Mr. Conrad is examining how the Democratic Congress should funnel the war spending requests through the House and Senate, said, “We need to have a better breakout of the costs — period.”

Meantime, the administration’s view is still what it has always been: Bush is a Unitary Executive, and Congress can not “bind how the president wants to put together the budget.” (Maybe not, but the congress still has to approve it.)

Make no mistake - we are going to see bruising battles over the budget and spending. The President and his party are going to try to paint the Democrats as Defeat-o-crats for demandign accountability, so we have to be ready and shoot down their bull-shit before the landing gear is raised.

They lost. They don't get to frame the debate. They don't get to pose false comparisons or analogies. They don't get to stand on the sidelines and say "What's your plan then? Hmmm?" and nit-pick the process while we clean up the mess they made.

No, they get to sit down and shut up for a change. They get to watch while the grown-ups get the ship of state off the shoals.

They also need a crash-course in humility, but that's a rant unto itself.

However, I think that day might be dawning, because the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that fully 59% of the American public would not vote for a hypothetical candidate simply because they had served in the Bush administration.

We have a presidnet who has for his entire term of office refused to deal with reality. Now, reality is about to deal with him.

Pop some corn and enjoy the show. It's gonna get good.

Walls fall down

Well now, really. What did we expect from rats? They always desert the sinking ship. Now the architects of the Mess in Mesopotamia are turning on the administration in droves. Some brief excerpts from the Vanity Fair article from October 2006.

Richard Perle

Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, blames the unfolding catastrophe on a central cause: dysfunction within the Bush administration. Perle states, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.…"

Kenneth Adelman

"I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Michael Rubin

"Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did."

David Frum

David Frum is the mastermind who dreamed up the 2002 State of the Union address, the so-called "Axis of Evil" speech.

It now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush. Frum goes on "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

Eliot Cohen

"I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.… I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.… The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."

Frank Gaffney

"[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home.

Those are some pretty strong statements coming from those who cooked up the grand cock-up.







The cover of the October issue of Vanity Fair was quite delicious, too. They punked The Weekly Standard with a cover-flap. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when neo-con adherents realized they had been scammed.