And, of course, a Republican President. That same Dem Congress brought the debt down with a Dem President (first two years of the Clinton admin). And yet, that same GOP Congress with GWBush as President had a rising deficit. Why? That's where thecorrelation lies. As noted above, the correlation does not go with who controls Congress.
the president, more than any one else, is responsible for the budget. afterall, the president ultimately approves all the budget submitted by Congress. if the Congress submits an irresponsible budget proposal, a fiscally responsible President would veto it. W has never vetoed a submitted budget until last year, the first year of the new Demo-controlled congress. during the 1st 6 year of his presidency, W passed very budget proposal submitted by the Republican-control Congress, including the one calling for $$$ alloted for the bridge to nowhere. W was in bed w the Repulican Congress to piss the US taxpayers $$$ away ur being intellectually dishonest, the President has the ultimate veto power QUOTE=ROCKET RICH NYC] Let's add that it was a DEMOCRATIC CONTROLLED HOUSE of Representatives during the Reagan-GHB years.[/quote] once again, ur being intellectually dishonest. during the first 6 yr of Dubya's presidency, the Congress was controlled by Republican. that's when W really pissed away the US taxpayers' $$$. since, the new Demo-controlled Congress took over (from 2007), the deficit actually has come down a bit. but it is still a SIZEABLE deficit. QUOTE=ROCKET RICH NYC] It was a REPUBLICAN CONTROLLED CONGRESS during Clinton's years that brought the National debt DOWN.[/quote] ur telling only part of the story. early in his first term, Clinton was able to get some of the Republicans to vote for a tax increase. imagine that, Republicans voting for a tax increase, attributable to Clinton's political savy. that got the ball rolling decrease the size of federal deficit. why do you have to resort to lying. W inherited a sizeable surplus from Clinton, and then pissed it all away in 7 months. then, in bed w the Republican-controlled congress to spend $$$ like drunken sailors. Since the Demo-controlled congress came to power, the spending has come just a tad. still a sizeable deficit. QUOTE=ROCKET RICH NYC] So don't just blame it on the Presidents.[/QUOTE] that's where the buck stops. W could have vetoed the fact-cat budget proposed the the Republican-controlled congress from 2001 to 2006. but he never did; not even once.
this is getting interesting! http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/30/wexler.mcclellan/index.html Congressman wants McClellan to testify under oath WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan should testify under oath on Capitol Hill about his explosive new book in which he sharply criticizes his old boss, a Democratic congressman said Friday. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Florida, said McClellan, who served as the president's press secretary before leaving the White House in 2006, would be able to provide valuable insight into a number of issues that the House Judiciary Committee is investigating. The committee is looking into the use of prewar intelligence, whether politics was behind the firing of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys in 2006 and the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson's identity, Wexler said. In the book, McClellan wrote that President Bush told him that he had authorized the leaking of Plame Wilson's identity to the press. "The administration has always called for different kinds of privileges to avoid their officials testifying, but because Mr. McClellan has put all this information in a book, these privileges, I do not believe, would be available to the administration, so we would have a free flow of information," Wexler said. Wexler is a senior member of the Judiciary Committee. Wexler said he did not know whether McClellan would fight a subpoena to testify before the committee, but suggested that any White House claims that McClellan should be barred from testifying due to executive privilege would be invalid because McClellan had put much of the information in the public domain with book and multiple television appearances. McClellan has not said whether he would be willing to to testify before Congress. Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino said Friday that the White House says it could invoke executive privilege and prevent McClellan from testifying before the committee, but it has not decided whether to do so. "The law would allow for that," Perino said, "but by saying that I am not suggesting that's what would happen or not. "We don't have a formal request yet," she said. "It's not a decision we would make prior to getting a formal request." McClellan's new memoir, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," is scheduled for publication Monday. In it he says the administration became mired in "propaganda" and political spin and played loose with the truth at times. McClellan will appear in CNN's "Situation Room" at 6 p.m. Friday. As White House spokesman, McClellan defended Bush's policies during much of the war in Iraq, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the scandal that followed the leak of Plame Wilson's identity. He said Thursday the latter episode was a "defining moment that caused me to become dismayed and disillusioned with the way things were going in Washington, D.C." In his book, McClellan wrote that President Bush had decided to go war with Iraq shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, and then ordered his aides to make the arguments for it. "I think very early on, a few months after September 11, he made a decision that we're going to confront Saddam Hussein, and if Hussein doesn't come fully clean, then we're going to go to war. There was really no flexibility in his approach," McClellan told NBC's "Today" show Thursday, referring to the former Iraqi dictator. "Then it was put on the advisers: How do we go about implementing this, how do we go about doing this?" Wexler said McClellan should testify because the public has a right to know what went on behind closed doors. "The American people deserve to know under oath what is true and what isn't [and] what this administration engaged in in terms of a conspiracy to obstruct justice," Wexler said.
he's almost as feckless as his namesake [rquoter]General McClellan's War May 30, 2008; Page A14 You can tell the Democratic presidential race is all but over. Cable television has returned to 24/7 coverage of whether President Bush lied us into war in Iraq. The latest peg is the Texan-bites-Bush story of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's memoir. By now you know the news, if that's the word for it: Mr. McClellan dutifully supported the war as presidential spokesman from 2003-2006, but he has since "become genuinely convinced" it was wrong. He has also had a revelation that the Administration used "propaganda" to sell the war, though this means he himself was chief propaganda minister for three years during which he expressed no similar qualms. Mr. McClellan settles various personal scores, and in particular seems bitter about former deputy chief of staff Karl Rove. White House aides can defend themselves, and we'll let others speculate about Mr. McClellan's motives for turning on his friends. We'd merely note that the book's publisher is PublicAffairs, an imprint founded by left-wing editor Peter Osnos and which has published six books by George Soros. PublicAffairs is owned by Perseus Books, which is owned by Perseus LLC, a merchant bank whose board includes Democrats Richard Holbrooke and Jim Johnson, who is now doing Barack Obama's vice presidential vetting. One of Perseus's investment funds, Perseus-Soros Biopharmaceutical, is co-managed with Mr. Soros. Mr. Osnos, who is "editor-at-large" at PublicAffairs, told liberal blogger Rachel Sklar that he "worked very closely" with Mr. McClellan and his editor, Lisa Kaufman. Readers can guess what advice Mr. Osnos gave them about how to make headlines and sell a book six months before a presidential election in which Iraq will be a major issue. And make no mistake, Iraq is the reason this book is getting so much political attention. Mr. Obama has staked out a position for immediate troop withdrawal that looks increasingly untenable amid the success of the "surge" and improving security in Baghdad and Basra. John McCain was a key supporter of the surge, so Democrats now want to change the subject and claim the war was a mistake in the first place and sold under false pretenses. Mr. McClellan's confessions fit neatly into this political narrative. The problem is that Mr. McClellan presents no major new detail to support his conclusions about Iraq, or even about the Administration's deliberations about how to sell the war. This may be because he was the deputy press secretary for domestic issues during the run-up to war and thus rarely attended war strategy sessions. His talking points are merely the well-trod claims that the Administration oversold the evidence about WMD and al Qaeda. Three independent investigations have looked into these claims, and all of them concluded that political actors did not skew intelligence to sell the war. These include the Senate Intelligence Committee report of 2004, the Robb-Silberman report of 2005, and Britain's Butler report. They explain that U.S. – and all Western – intelligence was mistaken but not distorted. Saddam Hussein himself told U.S. interrogators that he kept the fact that he lacked WMD even from many of his own generals. As for the "propaganda" claim, any U.S. President has no choice but to make his case for going to war. It is an obligation of democracy. In Iraq, the long march to the 2003 invasion included months of debate at the U.N. and in Congress. Far from rushing to war, Mr. Bush heeded Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair and sought U.N. approval. That required longer debate and a heavy reliance on WMD claims because the U.N.'s Iraq resolutions were mainly concerned with WMD after the first Gulf War. That too was a mistake, but it wasn't a lie. Mr. McClellan joins the queue of those who supported the war at first only to turn against it when it became difficult. The polls say most Americans now feel the same way, and that is no surprise: Long wars are rarely popular. But we continue to believe that a Middle East with Saddam ruling Iraq would be more dangerous than it is today. Saddam would again be pursuing WMD, in competition with Iran, and we might never have discovered Libya's nuclear program or unraveled the A.Q. Khan proliferation network. With the success of the surge, Iraq now has a chance to emerge as a stable, pro-American government. As we read it, the real critical lesson in Mr. McClellan's book concerns personnel and management. Despite his MBA pedigree, Mr. Bush often failed to mediate his Administration's many internal disputes – not least on Iraq. These differences festered and resulted in bad policy (the long Iraq occupation) or needless political retreat (Joseph Wilson and the 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union on yellowcake uranium). Mr. Bush also tolerated too many mediocrities for too long, either out of loyalty or Texas ties. On that point at least, Mr. McClellan is persuasive.[/rquoter]
why would he need to make nice? the times didn't in 2000, and look what happened to their circulation. oh, wait...
I was talking about Bush I after Reagan. it was a Democratic controlled House of Representatives during GH B. Did I say Dubya? NO! I was not intellectually being dishonest. You thought I was talking about GWB. I said GHB.
basso there are days when I think a dumber post is not forthcoming, yet you routinely head right to the forefront with something novel and more profoundly stupid. Suffice it to say the thesis you are advancing with this post ranks right up there with your very best (worst).
history will not be kind about the bush administration - I think it will serve as an example of incompetence and forever when an admin tries to argue war, people will hopefully remember how this president tried to mislead the public. So sad that we did this war just to fulfill the neo-conservative agenda and messed up dream of instilling american style democracy on the middle east. A romantic and naive view which our nation will pay for generations.
Well it wasn't really to install American style democracy unless you say that American style democracy is that we as Americans should have a foreign power decide when what our voters choose is ok. These neo-cons want the folks in the Middle East (The Palestinians) or Venezuela, Haiti or wherever to have democracy, but they readily subvert or try to overthrow by force the democratically elected governments if they don't like the results. This is readily apparent outside the US and is one of the reasons why they aren't buying the whole democracy theme, that has been cheapened by our actions abroad. Now I'm not saying that the likes of poor ol Basso whose whole world view changed on 9/11 don't believe that we did it all for democracy. The folks really running the show are very at ease with non-democratic governments like China, if they are good for business.
really? pissing off half their potential customer base, and lying to the rest, was a good business decision?
