Anti-choice Bushie Pushed VA Death Book Lie

As Sussex, Wisconsin native Thomas Tradewell, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Commander remains silent, a Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) health planning booklet is still the object of right wingers misleading veterans and other Americans it is cast as a "death book."

This lie was begun by anti-abortion George W. Bush staffer, Jim Towey. From Veterans Today:

How did the phony ‘death book’ debate involving Veterans Affairs begin? Simple. Fox News-owned Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by Jim Towey, former Bush coordinator of anti-abortion activities and political fixer.

Towey is now president of St. Vincent's College, though he has no experience of any kind as an educator. Further, 80% of the faculty have called for his resignation for falsifying documents. It was Towey, in his WSJ editorial who continually mischaracterized VA attempts to inform patients of choices as an attempt to encourage Gulf War veterans to commit suicide.

The pamphlet itself, Your Life, Your Choices, is far from controversial. In fact it is, if anything, frighteningly conservative and mainstream. The document is exhaustive in its addressing of faith based decision making. Every imaginable attempt was made to see to it that no group, no matter how ‘wingnut’ or extreme, would find anything to complain about. The result was a huge document, though extremely informative, that is too long for anyone to read or at least want to.

Now GOP Aims Lies at Veterans

Hey Sussex, Wisconsin native Thomas Tradewell, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Commander, where are you?

Because nothing is sacred to the Republican Party, certainly not veterans.

Chris Adams at McClatchy Newspapers reports, "While Republicans are calling a Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) health planning booklet a 'death book' that encourages veterans to kill themselves or forgo care, ethicists and legal and medical experts say it's a reasonable attempt to help America's veterans plan for the end of their lives."

Make no mistake, the GOP will tell any lie and dishonor America's 26-million veterans for a chance to stir up its benighted base. Now, they are claiming that the DVA is encouraging veterans to kill themselves.

Does the VFW approve of these lies?

There is seemingly no bottom to the Republican Party's capacity to lie in service to ... who knows what these people think they are doing?

Writes Gordon Duff at Veterans Today:

In a TV appearance where Michael Steele, GOP Chairman and defacto spokesman for the medical industry and Fox News's Chris Wallace fabricated a story citing the Department of Veterans Affairs for creating programs to force veterans to commit suicide. ...

Defending veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs was Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense, a watchdog group famed for uncovering VA corruption. Other veterans groups, some whose aging members were terrified by the Fox News story have neither made any significant effort to inform their membership or call the GOP and Fox News to account for this attack on the veterans health care system.

The wild and totally falsified claims made by Steele and Fox News are part of a pattern of deceptive reports intended to bring about an outcry against the government's attempt to guarantee health care for the ever increasing millions of uninsured Americans who are victims of the current economic collapse.

Why a political party and news network with passive complicity from veterans organizations would perpetrate such a massive fraud meant to victimize thousands of aging veterans may seen surprising to some.

Again I ask, Thomas Tradewell, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Commander, where are you?

McClatchy News: Healthcare Opposition Contrived

Update: Gov. Dean predicts healthcare legislation with public option signed in September.

Margaret Talev sets the record straight in Who's behind the attacks on a health care overhaul?

Writes Talev in McClatchy Newspapers:

Much of the money and strategy behind the so-called grassroots groups organizing opposition to the Democrats' health care plans comes from conservative political consultants, professional organizers and millionaires, some of whom hold financial stakes in the outcome.

'Baghdad will burn' Maliki told Obama of Torture Photos Release

Nancy A. Youssef from McClatchy Newspapers has a blockbuster that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki told President Obama that releasing the detainee torture photos from Iraq and Afghanistan would be explosive and that "Baghdad will burn" if the photos became public—a warning that resulted in Obama reversing his previous decision to release the photos.

War and torture do tend to piss off people.

On Monday, the ACLU and numerous human rights and peace organization released a letter calling for making the photos public with a clear statement that the U.S. repudiates such "barbaric behavior and is committed to dismantling the culture that allowed it to occur."
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The full text of the letter to President Obama is below.

June 1, 2009

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

We write to express our profound disappointment with your decision on May 13 to block the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees by U.S. personnel overseas. We urge you to reconsider that misguided decision and to renew your commitment to our nation's most fundamental principles.

On your first full day in office, you eloquently proclaimed your administration's commitment to the principle of open government. You said: "A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency." That is exactly right. The hallmark of an open society is that we do not conceal information that reflects poorly on us - we expose it to the light of day, so that wrongdoers can be held accountable and future abuses prevented.

These photographs will no doubt be disturbing, as they should be. And we understand your concern about reaction to them overseas. But suppressing information to prevent public anger is inconsistent with democratic principles. The Pentagon should release the photos while reaffirming to the world that the U.S. repudiates such barbaric behavior and is committed to dismantling the culture that allowed it to occur. In the end, full disclosure of the crimes committed by our government will make us all safer.

The last eight years have demonstrated all too painfully that excessive secrecy creates a fertile environment for grave abuses. Those abuses have tarnished our nation's reputation and damaged its security. We will restore our standing as a leader on human rights not by hiding images of our failures, but by demonstrating that those failures will not go unpunished.

As you yourself have stated, 'the Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.' Suppressing photographs of abuse places your administration on the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of history. We hope you will reconsider your decision.

Sincerely,

Alliance for Justice
American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Center for Constitutional Rights
Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, NYU School of Law
Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
CREDO Mobile
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Feminists for Free Expression Government Accountability Project
Human Rights Watch
International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action (JALSA)
Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School
National Security Archive
OMB Watch
OpenTheGovernment.org
PEN American Center
Physicians for Human Rights
Progressive Librarians Guild (PLG)
Reporters Without Borders
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society
Veterans for Common Sense
Veterans For Peace

Obama Looks Like a Winner

The new political narrative: Tide flowing for Obama as campaign enters final weeks as Steven Thomma writes in McClatchy Newspapers:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Five weeks before election day, the tide may be turning toward Barack Obama

And State Polls Breaking For Obama Big-Time: Full Speed Ahead in Kos.

A lot of folks won't be happy until the evening of Nov. 4 and perhaps they shouldn't be given the GOP propensity for dirty tricks and election rigging that would make a third-world dictator blush.

But Obama will have an army of poll observers on election day, and will come down just as hard on GOP dirty tricks as his campaign did on the GOP's attempted (and failed) vote suppression stunt in Wisconsin and similar fare in other states.

McCain Using Race Now

Update: Affirmative distraction
via mal contends - Jesse Helms and the Southern Strategy live.

John McCain just cannot resist that old-time religion used by the GOP in fighting general election presidential campaigns: Race as a wedge issue.

Obama says McCain flip-flops by opposing affirmative action reads a McClatchy headline on a piece by William Douglas, though a more instructive headline is that: McCain did flip-flop on affirmative action.

That flip-flop is a fact, and should be reported as such.

Writes Douglas:

McCain, speaking on ABC's 'This Week,' said he backs a proposed ballot initiative in Arizona that would prohibit affirmative action policies by state and local governments. ... McCain's endorsement was an apparent shift on affirmative action. ... He opposed a 1998 resolution in the Arizona legislature that asked voters to eliminate most preferences based on race, gender or ethnic origin. ... 'Rather than engage in divisive ballot initiatives, we must have a dialogue and cooperation and mutual efforts together to provide every child in America to fulfill their expectations,' (McCain) said at the time.

As Jamin Raskin has written, opponents of equality of opportunity have been arguing since reconstruction that blacks just need to help themselves and have only themselves to blame for any lack of achievement in America.

The critics of affirmative action invite us to believe that we live in a color-blind society in which the last vestige of racial discrimination is affirmative action itself. ... To transcend the destructive politics of division and derision surrounding affirmative action (if we still can), we need to reaffirm the equality of all peoples in a culturally pluralist society and to posit a universal politics of freedom and equality for the next century. But a vigorous defense of affirmative action right now is central to such a politics. For in a society where the lines of race and gender double as lines of class and power, even the idea of affirmative action for minorities and women is an affront to the structure of domination and inequality. Our job must be to make affirmative action the first line of defense in a politics which insists that all citizens have a right to equal participation in the fruits of our social life.

I'm sure a desperate John McCain will have no qualms about using race, overtly and through subliminal message impressions, as a means of staving off a rout in November.

Jobless? Losing your standard of living? The blacks (and their Jew allies) did it!

Jesse Helms would be proud. Now McCain needs to get down to Philadelphia , Mississippi and make a rip-roaring good speech, a la Ronald Reagan.

Lies Catching Up to Bush Administration

Famed journalist I.F. Stone warned "All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."

Like in many other aspects of government, the Bush administration has veered to the extreme in its mendacity.

Guantánamo Bay holds only the worst of the worst, the administration repeatedly assured the American public after preventing examination of the evidence holding the accused.

Turns out the administration (as McClatchy news demonstrated in its America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men in mid-June) is the worst of the worst in its commitment to bald-faced lying.

Today's Post and Times report on the duplicity of the administration that contends in legal arguments that because the Chinese government said so and the assertions were repeated several times by American officials, accused terrorist, Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur Muslim who fled a persecuting Chinese government, must be a terrorist.

The argument was ridiculed and dismissed by a conservative, unanimous appellate panel:

From the Times:

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” ...

The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas.

The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

See the opinion at Huzaifa Parhat v. Robert M. Gates et al (No 06-1307).

Secret Torturing US Government

From Tom Lasseter at McClatchy:

The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. ...

American Concern for Human Rights Waning

McClatchy's America's prison for terrorists often held innocent men piece yesterday ought to have produced screaming headlines and constant chatter about the crimes that the Bush administration had committed at Guantanamo.

The findings by the comprehensive, unprecedented McClatchy interviews "...conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization" and US officials talking on background produced nothing of the kind, telling us much about the politcal culture.

In sum, the administration tortured innocents who they knew to be innocent, devised a legal framework to shield the US government from being held accountable, and broke the international laws on human rights self-consciously and shamelessly.

Among the findings:

- A series of White House directives placed 'suspected enemy combatants' beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.

- In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.

- Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.

- Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the 'War Council' devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected 'enemy combatants' indefinitely with few legal rights.

The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.

- The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.

- With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.

Today a Washington Post piece, Report Questions Pentagon Accounts,
Officials Looked Into Interrogation Methods Early On, contains similar revelations.

Meeting Racism Head-on

Update: And speaking of Islam, Was Muhammed REALLY a man of peace? Human Events is on this faster than you can say 'Islamofascism'

Second-hand, I heard an anecdote last week about some typical rural, white Georgia residents.

As reported to me, said one resident: "A lot of people like Obama. I love Obama, but it’s too bad he’s a Muslim, he’ll never get elected. "

McClatchy had a piece Thursday on the same sentiment: Where did the Web rumors about Obama come from?

Writes Matt Stearns:

Some things about Barack Obama rub some voters the wrong way.

"We don't need a Muslim," said Jannay Smith, a retiree from Kokomo,
Ind. "Who's to say if he gets in there what he'll do?"

Added Steve Shallenberger, a Kokomo electrician: "He's just calling himself a Christian because he knows that's what we in Indiana want to hear."

Then there's Sherry Richey, also from Kokomo: "He wouldn't put his hand on the Bible; he wanted the Quran. He won't put his hand over his heart during the anthem or say the Pledge of Allegiance. He's too un-American."

All of these slurs on Obama are categorically untrue.

But, Stearns notes, this has not prevented the slurs from being pushed on the Internet, nor has it prevented campaigns from appealing to the racism and ignorance that still exists, worrying some astute analysts.

Writes Stearns:

E-mails falsely claiming that Obama is a Muslim, that he took the oath of office on a Quran and that he refuses to take the Pledge of Allegiance have stormed inboxes. A newer e-mail has a picture, allegedly of Obama posing with his African family, with the title 'Say Hi to the next potential first family.'

I received an e-mail like this myself last year, from a decent American, and the e-mail is despicable (published below).

The fact is racism exists, but this time we are not going to run from it, and John McCain will do his worst. The following e-mail is repulsive, then again so is John McCain's appeal to fear and ignorance.

Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 08:20:53 -0800 (PST)

Subject: Why Obama wants to be President of the US...

Very interesting and something that should be considered in your choice. If you do not ever forward anything else, please forward this to all your contacts...this is very scarey to think of what lies ahead of us here in our own United States .... better heed this and pray about it and share it.

We checked this out on " snopes.com". It is factual. Check for yourself. Who is Barack Obama? Probable U. S. presidential candidate, Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black MUSLIM from Nyangoma-Kogel , Kenya and Ann Dunham, a white ATHIEST from Wichita , Kansas ..

Obama's parents met at the University of Hawaii . When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced. His father returned to Kenya . His mother then married Lolo Soetoro, a RADICAL Muslim from Indonesia.?

When Obama was! 6 years old, the family relocated to Indonesia . Obama attended a MUSLIM school in Jakarta He also spent two years in a Catholic school. Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim. He is quick to point out that, "He was once a Muslim, but that he also attended Catholic school."

Obama's political handlers are attempting to make it appear that?

Obama's introduction to Islam came via his father, and that this influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya soon after the divorce, and never again had any direct influence over his son's education. Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, introduced his stepson to Islam. Obama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta Wahabism is the RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world.

Since it is politically expedient to be a CHRISTIAN when seeking major public office in the United States , Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background.

ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible , but instead the Koran. Let us all remain alert concerning Obama's expected presidential candidacy.

The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the US from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level - through the President of the United States , one of their own!!!! Please forward to everyone you know. Would you want this man leading our country?...... NOT ME!!!

Hillary's Appeal to Racism Is a Project, Not an Accident

Hillary Clinton's evolving attacks to define and brand Barack Obama involve what advertising and marketing professionals call impressions—the projection of one image (in this case Barack Obama) onto one human brain (a voter).

Designing and managing Obama’s brand by generating impressions for the benefit of Hillary running in the primary, it is necessary to merge negative (ostensibly plausible) aspects of Obama onto the consciousness of key voting demographics susceptible to certain appeals based on fear and xenophobia.

The more frequent and emotionally potent the impression, the greater is the political impact.

That’s why we see the escalation after the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary of Hillary's project of generating political impressions of Muslim, Black, stranger, unsteady, Ken Starr, creepy, inexperience, and so on.

One threat to the project is the negative reaction of the African-American community and its allies well-versed in recognizing racist appeals, subtle or not so subtle. This threat is being realized today as we see Obama taking some 80 to 90 percent of the African-American vote in primaries and caucuses.

Hillary's amoral and empirically valid branding of her opponent is more simply stated as an old South appeal to racism.

Concomitant with branding Obama is the project of projecting Hillary as a unique and convincing brand of steady, strong, experienced, familiar, and knowledgeable.

Even among Democratic-voting communities with a negative predisposition towards Hillary, this brand of Hillary with the above positive qualities rings true, so we see Hillary present her Commander-in-Chief credentials, including vast foreign policy and national security experience.

Facts can get in the way of Hillary's project. And we do see the occasional piece knocking down Hillary's brand. See today's Clinton's foreign experience is more limited than she says, for example

But William Douglas's thoughtful and rigorous piece in McClatchy Newspapers noted above makes less an impact than Hillary's crash kitchen sink, branding program.

After all, Hillary's is not an appeal to thoughtfulness and issue analysis; rather it is an emotional appeal to unthinking racist sentiments that can be identified in micro-demographics by Hillary's campaign devoted to the enterprise.

Some demographics can be counted on to combat Hillary’s racist, divisive project (for example):

- Today's socially tolerant under-29 vote

- Social justice progressives

- Casually political, middle-class Americans fed-up with Bush and division and concerned about fairness

Hillary is hoping these spheres remain marginalized and ineffective in Pennsylvania and the coming campaign.

Selling her soul is not a decisive factor to consider. As Hillary once said in a different context, face reality!

There Is No U.N.-mandated occupation of Iraq; McClatchy Parrots Old Bush Lie

Update: Robert Parry's The 'Triumphant' Neocons:
Citing signs of military progress in Iraq, America’s neoconservatives are reasserting their vision of the United States as an imperial power that can reshape the Muslim world in a way favorable to the interests of Washington and Tel Aviv.

McClatchy Newspapers has been a rare treasure, a news service often reporting the facts and history flatly contradicting the PR streaming out of the White House.

But Leila Fadel's piece Monday is a disappointing exception.

Fadel writes:

BAGHDAD — Iraq and the United States agreed Monday that the U.N.-mandated occupation of Iraq will end in December 2008 and that any U.S. troop presence in the country after that time will be subject to U.S.-Iraq negotiations that are to be completed by next summer.

But there was no "UN-mandated occupation" of Iraq. Bush could not muster it. And Fadel parrots a discredited administration line.

The U.S. is calling the shots in Iraq. The war of aggression remains illegal. There is no functioning government in Iraq, as millions remain displaced, and over one million killed, wounded or jailed.
As Robert Parry notes (Sept. 4, 2004):

“Although the (UN) inspection organization was now operating at full strength and Iraq seemed determined to give it prompt access everywhere, the United States appeared as determined to replace our inspection force with an invasion army,” Blix wrote in his book, Disarming Iraq. ...
Perry quotes Bush:

“I went there [the United Nations] hoping that once and for all the free world would act in concert to get Saddam Hussein to listen to our demands,” Bush said during the presidential debate on Sept. 30, 2004. “They [the Security Council] passed a resolution that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. I believe when an international body speaks, it must mean what it says."

Fuuny.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has said the U.S. invasion of Iraq was ''an illegal act that contravened the UN charter.'' (BBC, 16 September, 2004).

Scott Ritter points out that:
Unilaterally attacking Iraq is totally unconstitutional and illegal under United Nations Charter and Nuremberg Judgements.

Andy Dunn points out in Z-Net:
Bush claimed that he was invading Iraq to enforce UN Security Council (UN Security Council) resolutions and that the UN’s reluctance to endorse his invasion risked making the institution “irrelevant.” Besides the contrary logic of “do what we want or you’re irrelevant,” the charge that Iraq was then violating resolutions on WMD was dubious, if not completely false. Likewise, the charge that resolutions were violated by Iraq’s firing on U.S.-British planes over the “no-fly zones” (aircraft that regularly killed civilians throughout the previous decade) was also false and was rebuffed by the UN’s secretary-general and members of the Security Council.

Powell’s and Bush’s presentations of detailed lies to the UN failed to convince the UNSC that invading Iraq was justified (despite U.S. bribes, arm twisting, and spying on delegations to the UNSC), [in fact, Ari Fleischer was literally laughed out of White House press room for suggesting in late Feb. 2003 that countries were not being bribed to support the UNCS - "MR. FLEISCHER: I haven't seen the story. And you already have the answer, about what this will be decided on. But think about the implications of what you're saying. You're saying that the leaders of other nations are buyable. And that is not an acceptable proposition. (Laughter.)" The video is hilarious.] a lack of approval which made our subsequent invasion explicitly illegal under the UN Charter, under international law as agreed to by the U.S. through treaty (and hence also illegal under U.S. law), and under war crimes conventions that describe such aggressive war as the “supreme crime.”

Remember Bush's March, 2003 speech that "France and the rest of world have to show their cards on the table" to support a UNSC resolution authorizing the invasion.

Bush never got his resolution, invaded anyway, with predictable results.

So, now the UN has mandated the occupation of the country, the invasion of which it refused to endorse?

What's with Leila Fadel?

What's with McClatchy Newspapers?

Please contact and ask: McClatchy Newspapers' Baghdad bureau can be reached through the D.C. office. Leila Fadel, Bureau Chief, kriraq@yahoo.com .

Update:

Amazing the opprobrium one receives in asserting that:

- Charter of the United Nations, the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal still apply today.
- The Westphalia convention still applies today.
- The Iraqi invasion and war are and remain illegal.
- The Iraq government is a fiction.

One writer at Kos, in a cross-post, tells me in comments twice to “fu&K off”.

And now accuses me of “Following me around and TRing (whatever that means) me from diary-to-diary ... ,” though I have no idea who this writer is, and have not (and judging from his/her comments) would not read his/her pieces, diaries, as it were.

Person IDs him/her self as one Shane Hensinger. He/she must be off the meds.

One cannot speak of a UN-mandated occupation when an illegal war of aggression continues in a land with no legitimate government.

Some Kos readers fail to grasp this rather obvious point that the rest of the world comprehends effortlessly.
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McClatchy: Fiscal Crisis Threatens U.S. future

The Bush administration's self-conscious program to run up the national debt to put politically popular programs - Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid - in peril has succeeded beyond expectations.

At the beginning of the Bush administration, there was talk about $trillion surpluses and the beginnings of a debate over the wisdom of having too large of a budget surplus, with no national debt.

Bush and Cheney have made that reality a distant memory.

Writes Kevin G. Hall at McClatchy:

... President Bush touts the now-shrinking annual federal budget deficit, the amount that annual spending exceeds tax receipts. The deficit fell from a high of $413 billion in fiscal 2004 to about $163 billion in fiscal 2007.

But that masks what's happened to the gross federal debt, the sum of outstanding debt issued by the federal government. Since fiscal 2001, the federal debt has soared from $5.8 trillion to $8.9 trillion.

Like everything else Bush has done, running up the national debt was a well-crafted big con, this time with the American people and our grandchildren as the marks and the coming zap on the U.S. Treasury as the Sting.

But not to worry, Bush's family will be fine, and that's what really important.
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