Robert Samuelson: Bush a Flatulent Cow Engaged in a Public Disinformation Campaign

Mark Thoma finds Robert Samuelson of Newsweek and theWashington Post far gone into total insanity: calling George W. Bush and the Republican Congressional leadership flatulent cows engaged in a campaign of public disinformation--that's a striking image:

Economist's View: Yet Another Robert Samuelson Edition...: No Shame, No Sense and a $296 Billion Bill, by Robert J. Samuelson, Commentary, Washington Post: [U]tterly shameless... President Bush... federal budget... flatulence in cows... the Republicans' orgy of self-approval amounts to a campaign of public disinformation.... [T]he budget should be balanced -- or run a surplus -- when the economy is close to "full employment," as it is now.... Bush doesn't praise... interest payment on the growing federal debt... rise from $184 billion in 2005 to $302 billion in 2011. Some conservatives rationalize their indifference to deficits as "starving the beast"... theory doesn't fit the facts...

Yep. He has been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, and disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration.

Too bad we couldn't have had any of this rhetoric from Robert Samuelson six years ago, back when Bush was lowballing the cost of his tax cut by assuming that most of it would be snarfed back by the Alternative Minimum Tax when adding all the numbers up and highballing the "benefits" to the rich by assuming the AMT would be repealed when calculating any individual's tax cut. That was a bigger campaign of public disinformation. And I'm sure Samuelson was hearing the same things I was in 2000 from people who'd been to Crawford and come back shaking their heads at what they found there.

And it's too bad that Robert Samuelson has turned himself into the Noam Chomsky of the budget with his insistance on "moral equivalence" in fiscal policy: that in every column of his he has to make stuff up so that he can claim that "Democrats aren't much better [than Republicans]." You have to very carefully parse Samuelson's words: when Samuelson writes that "budget surpluses from 1998 to 2001... resulted mainly from the end of the Cold War (which lowered defense spending) and the economic boom" he is not denying that Clinton did a huge amount of heavy lifting to improve the fiscal situation--he is only asserting that Clinton's policy changes brought the budget back from the Reagan deficits not into surplus but only into rough balance. (I have dealt with this before.)

Still, flatulent cows engaged in a public disinformation campaign--that's good.

Comments

[bakho]

Revenues as % of GDP in 2000: 20.9%

Revenues as % of GDP in 2005: 17.5%

38 Senators voted against the Bush tax cuts, all Democrats.

End of story.

[mds]

Samuelson also manages to get in a couple of good shots at Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Presumably these must be gutted so that the tax cuts for the richest Americans remain in place. And note that Democrats are no better; they pushed a Medicare drug plan that was even more costly, apparently due to its requirement that the federal government use its enormous bargaining power to negotiate lower prices. So leave Samuelson out of the Order of the Shrill, please. This is just another example of digby's well-documented "No True Conservative" phenomenon. "Oh, if only real conservatives were in power; they'd cut taxes even more, but also follow through on dismantling the New Deal."

Okay, the flatulent cows thing was good.

[dilbert dogbert]

Is mds = "Mary Rosh"?

[mds]

'Is mds = "Mary Rosh"?'

Eh? Do you think that I'm actually Professor DeLong? Or John Lott? Or that Professor DeLong is actually John Lott? Please elaborate, or I'll discharge one of my many Constitutionally-protected firearms.*

*This is not even remotely a serious threat. Rather, it is an additional riff on the peculiar invocation of Mary Rosh. Also, I condemn Deb Frisch.

[Robert Bell]

In the earlier post you reference, you show an attribution for the budget surplus, but owing to blindness or senility I don't see a reference to a paper which showed how that analysis is done.

Do you have such a link?

Apologies in advance if I missed it.

[Slow Boiling Frog]

A Mental Exercise (Off-Topic)

Imagine that you were a progressive American, and hated the Bush/Cheney administration for all the usual reasons: their cronyism with Big Oil, their tax cuts for the rich, the continuous erosion of civil liberties, and their lies, lies, lies....

But what if, in spite of this, it was common belief, for liberals and conservatives alike, that Sadaam Hussein actually HAD developed Weapons of Mass Destruction, was connected to Al Qaeda, and was an imminent threat to us; therefore, our invasion/occupation of Iraq was completely justified?

Imagine that it was such a "given" that the administration and the media were telling us all we needed to know that we steadfastly went along with their masquerade? And if we ran across bits of information that contradicted the official story, we would ignore it, much as a conservative will ignore the facts that a liberal gives them because they conflict with their established world view.

In such a scenario, the pressure to believe the conventional wisdom would be so intense that few would have the courage to express their doubts publicly ... to their friends, family, and fellow liberals. And those occasional musings from people who've stumbled on news stories or websites or books that doubted the official Bush story would be denounced as lies and crackpot theories.

Thankfully, we know that the war was unjustified and was based on lies. But think for a minute.... are there any other assumptions that we as Americans from all over the political spectrum hold? Beliefs about the world that we live in that might actually have been manipulated by the Bush/Cheney administration and the media? Are there any tidbits of information that we have run across in the last few years that just don't quite stack up, but we ignore because they contradict our established beliefs? Is there anything that a few daring souls are starting to espouse, only to be shot down, by the likes of both Kos AND Hannity?

Perhaps it's time to start questioning some of the beliefs that we hold about our world since Bush entered office and the reason he has been able to remain President in spite of our efforts. If enough of us start to question our assumptions, as I recently did, we might start noticing, and even welcoming, new perspectives about the current administration. We might discover something that would turn the tide against the neo-cons in a big way if it got out. Maybe we can start talking to our friends and fellow progressives about it rather than worrying about what they will think of us if we discuss such matters.

Our leaders are far worse than most of us can admit to ourselves, and everything we need to know is out there, just slightly hidden, if we look hard enough. That's all I'm saying for now.