So, tomorrow is Bullshit‘s big party. Let’s see what’s on his agenda for the next four years:
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Either Destroy Social Security
Economist Paul Krugman explains Bush’s latest con – social security.
To save Social Security, Bush wants to destroy it – replacing government-guaranteed retirement benefits with private accounts that will be subject to the whims of the stock market. It’s an expensive plan. Allowing workers to divert even a small portion of their payroll taxes into private investments, as Bush is proposing, would require the government to borrow at least $2 trillion to make up the immediate shortfall.[...] “The people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary weapons,” Krugman wrote recently, “are now trying another bum’s rush.”
or
… the goal is to create a political dynamic over the next one to two years in which the Republicans appear the party of opportunity, ownership, dynamism, and forward thinking, while the Democrats appear to be the defenders of old, boring, inadequate safety net programs. As Gingrich said, going for the biggest privatization of Social Security has the biggest political payoff, but only if it doesn’t actually become law.
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
At his nomination hearing yesterday, Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Michael Leavitt asserted that “states could provide health insurance to more people” by cutting benefits. Leavitt is heralded for the Medicaid waiver program he set up as governor of Utah, but the program, which the Bush administration has also touted as a way for states to deal with budget shortfalls, makes health care problems worse.
Pack the Supreme Court with right-wing crazies
Although Rehnquist is a reliable conservative vote, his replacement will be of some significance. [...] as Susan Jacoby recently wrote in the Prospect, Rehnquist’s conservatism is of a different cloth than some potential replacements — he is “a legal conservative, not a religious fundamentalist.” Rehnquist shares President Bush’s interest in interpreting the Constitution to change the underlying structure and power of the federal government, but he has not beared down on hot-button social issues as many potential nominees might.
Nominate Clarence Thomas for Chief Justice (Think that might be a stretch? Don’t bet the farm on it.)
Will President Bush actually have the guts to nominate Clarence Thomas for chief justice of the Supreme Court when that opportunity arises, probably soon? You know he’s just aching to do it. Because of their shared judicial philosophy, of course. But also because of that arrogant willfulness Bush has that a more generous person than myself might even call integrity.
Tax the middle class out of existence
Just as important as the sequencing of Bush’s tax cuts has been the substance of them, which provides a hint of where tax reform is likely to go. In theoretical terms, Bush’s cuts have brought the United States tax code closer to a system under which income from savings and investments aren’t taxed at all and revenues would be raised exclusively from taxes on labor. The consequence of those policies is that a greater proportion of tax revenues now come from what the middle class earns and a smaller proportion from what the wealthy earn.
Wow. And those are just the stories for the last week! I wonder what he has up his sleeve for his third term? What? You say, he can’t run again? Oh, silly me, I forgot one:
href=”http://dove.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/26/13228/766″>Repeal the 22 Amendment
George Bush for President in 2008. All Hail King George!
by Okiedemocrat
Sun Dec 26th, 2004 at 10:02:28 PST I was listening to CNN. I don’t know who the Repub was who was on with Rangle, but when asked who he thought might run for prez in 2008, he said that he would be working on repealing the 22 amendment so Bush could run again!!!!!!!!!!
(OK, maybe that one really *is* a stretch.)
And where will our much-maligned ‘liberal media’ be during all this? They’ll be cowering in the corner, following the The Bush Rule of Journalism:
“Don’t take on the Bushes” is becoming an unwritten rule in American journalism. Reporters can make mistakes in covering other politicians and suffer little or no consequence, but a false step when doing a critical piece on the Bushes is a career killer.
The latest to learn this hard lesson are four producers at CBS, who demonstrated inadequate care in checking out memos purportedly written by George W. Bush’s commanding officer in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. For this sloppiness, CBS fired the four, including Mary Mapes who helped break last year’s Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
It’s going to be a busy four years.