corrente

After lying, looting is what Republicans do best!

First, the looting part:

Sociopolitical events within the last year provide worrisome evidence confirming the existence of stockpiles of WMD. Most recently, the chief actuary of the Medicare program, Richard S. Foster, claimed that he was instructed to withhold his forecast of a significantly higher cost for the new Medicare drug bill prior to its passage.

According to reports in the New York Times, Foster said that Thomas A. Scully, the administrator of the program, threatened him with dismissal if he provided Congress with the higher price tag -- a $500 to $600 billion cost over the first 10 years. Foster's higher estimate was later conceded by the Bush administration, but only after the drug bill had passed, based on a premised cost of "just" $400 billion. Several Republican and Democrat lawmakers who voted for the bill have subsequently declared that they would not have supported it had they known the truth.

The problem remains, however, that we are already set in the crosshairs of this WMD. If Foster's allegations are verified, Scully will have played a major role in destabilizing Medicare, upon which most of us who live to 65 years of age will depend during our most medically vulnerable years.

One wonders about the ability of Thompson's office to investigate the charges against Scully in a fair and objective manner. Looking to May of last year, when a federal ethics law interfered with Mr. Scully's desire to job-seek in the private sector -- all the while that he was designing the Medicare drug law -- Thompson easily solved the problem by approving a waiver exempting Scully from the ethics rule.

Scully resigned from his position on Dec. 15, just seven days following Bush's signing of the drug law. He announced that was joining a private law firm, one that represented drug manufacturers.
(via Kate Scannel, MD in the Alameda Times-Star)

So Scully destablizes Medicare while in government, then leaves to work for a company that will profit from our loss. It's hard to find a clearer and more shameless example of Republican looting.

Now, the lying part:

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.

You might think this is standard operating procedure in Washington. It is not. Every White House sends the press secretary out to spin the numbers that emerge on a weekly or monthly basis from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies. But applying political pressure to cook the numbers themselves is a true scandal.

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. (Jonathan Alter in Newsweek)

But how to get this message across? Will the "just the facts" approach really work? Has it ever before? Can it now?

NOTE The Misleadertron™ (back here) is a technical answer to getting the facts across, and I wish we could apply the same technology to other issues. But is it a political answer?