The Bush Lexicon

“Deeply Irresponsible”

• Sponsoring a Senate bill that would the slow growth of spending by Defense and the intelligence agencies by $1.5 billion over 5 years.

“Steady Leadership”

• Trying to increase the amount of arsenic in our drinking water.
• Cutting funding for programs that keep raw sewage out of our drinking water by $800 million.
• Taking more vacation than any President ever.
• Blowing off at least 6 months of your Guard commitment and lying about it.
• Turning $200 billion per year of surplus into $500 billion per year in deficits.
• Lying to congress about the cost of your Medicare drugs plan.
• Failing to fund your own education program.
• Crafting tax cuts with sunset provisions to fit the cost into an artificial framework, then decrying those sunset provisions and demanding they be repealed.
• Only projecting budgets 5 years out because years 6–10 look so bad.
• Not including hundreds of billions of dollars of known costs in those projections.
• Publishing job growth projections so laughable that you have to publicly disown them within two weeks.
• Publishing job growth projections that are off by almost one million jobs on the day the ink hits paper.
• Having your Labor Secretary lie about whether you signed that job projection report.
• Promising that you can take $1 trillion out of Social Security without decreasing benefits or increasing premiums.
• Promising that you won’t touch the Social Security trust fund, then raiding every last dime to pay for tax cuts for millionaires.
• Accusing Senate Democrats—the people who proposed the Department of Homeland Security and forced you to accept it—of not caring about the security of the nation because they wanted DHS workers to have the same labor protections as other federal employees.
• Leaking the identity of a covert agent to the press for petty political gain.
• Putting the same guys who ran our Latin America policy in the 80s—a policy distinguished by death squads, disappearances, coups, and Iran-Contra—in charge of the same policy area today.
• Moving military and intelligence resources away from the fight against the people who did attack us, in order to fight someone who didn’t.
• Misleading the country about the magnitude and immediacy of the threat posed by Iraq in order to accumulate political support for a war you planned well in advance of the event you claim changed everything and forced the war upon us.
• Sending our soldiers to war with insufficient equipment, insufficient support, and no real plan for getting them out.
• Ignoring the best advice of the military about how many boots on the ground would be required to secure Iraq.
• Letting bin Laden get away because you didn’t have enough boots on the ground in Afghanistan either.

Filed under: politics/2004