February 20, 2003
I was quite ready to add Alan Greenspan to my sold-out list today. Surprise-- he came down hard against the Bush tax plan, for the obvious reason that it will create huge government deficits and necessitate strenuous borrowings by future administrations to pay the bills.
July 2005: I spoke too soon. Greenspan shamefully "righted" himself and endorsed Bush's tax-cutting strategy. Ironically, it is now demonstrable that Bush's argument that tax cuts rev up the economy thus producing off-setting increases in tax revenues is wrong, wrong, wrong.
He still buys into the stupid "double-taxation" joke on dividends (as if wages aren't taxed twice as well, once as income, and secondly as social security).
2011-05 It is now obvious that Greenspan was right the first time: the Bush tax cuts are a major contributing factor to the massive government deficits facing the current administration. But then, his reputation is pretty well destroyed by now anyway
According to Colin Powell, the tape that was recently released by Osama Bin Laden and broadcast on the Al Jazeera network, "proves" that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein are linked.
Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman, was less coy. Forgetting, perhaps, that one of the initial reasons for America's inevitable invasion of Iraq was its links to the terrorist organization, Fleischer said that the tape showed that Al Qaeda and Saddam were "linking up" (New York Times, February 12, 2003). Ooops. I meant "had linked up".
These guys have spun out of control here. They are beginning to believe their own propaganda. If, like me, you read the text of the tape first and then saw Colin Powell, you wondered what the hell he was talking about. If, like most Americans, you heard Powell speak and never read the transcript, you thought, what's with those crazy French? Don't they realize we have proof?
George Tenet of the CIA is somewhat more circumspect. I think he is embarrassed, but, like Powell, has had his arm twisted and has decided he'd rather ride in circles whooping and wheezing with this posse of yahoos than exit quietly out the back door. A few years from now, he'll need to make some money and you don't get $50K a speech if you can't talk about something exciting like plotting the extra-judicial killing of a foreign leader or terrorist.
The scale of the Bush administration's mendacity has become breathtaking. This government does not "feel it's way" carefully, with scrutiny and foresight. It acts like it believe it is receiving direct messages from the Almighty on stone tablets that are carefully dusted for anthrax before being smashed over the heads of the Democrats.
How does this play out in 2004? I'm old enough to know better than to think too wishfully. I suspect that Bush will shortly crash and burn-- the economy is not perking up and probably won't perk up until after the war. The war is obviously scheduled for political reasons this year, so it can be done with and celebrated in early 2004, but late enough so that the inevitable debacle afterwards-- regional instability, new terrorist attacks, Osama thumbing his nose-- won't happen until after the 2004 elections.
I made the mistake before of believing that U.S. military victory would not come easy. I now tend to think that it will, indeed, come very easily. That's why Bush has chosen Iraq to bear the brunt of his Mosaic complex. It has no air force. It has no real defense. Bush and Powell keep raving about the "threats" from Iraq as if Iraq had any kind of military strength, but that is essential to their political survival: if Americans see that they are the bully and Iraq is the 90 pound weakling, the medal ceremonies and flag-waving afterwards won't have much resonance.
Copyright © 2003 Bill Van Dyk All rights