From The New York Times, 2/13/04:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/opinion/13KRUG.html
By PAUL KRUGMAN
To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National
Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget
published last week.
No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics -- the pictures.
By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush.
We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of
the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair,
helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail
through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops
in Iraq.
Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president
swimming across the Yangtze River.
It was not ever thus.
Bill Clinton's budgets were illustrated with tables and charts, not
with worshipful photos of the president being presidential.
The issue here goes beyond using the Government Printing Office to
publish campaign brochures.
In this budget, as in almost everything it does, the Bush
administration tries to blur the line between reverence for the office
of president and reverence for the person who currently holds that
office.
Operation Flight Suit was only slightly more over the top than other
Bush photo-ops, like the carefully staged picture that placed Mr.
Bush's head in line with the stone faces on Mount Rushmore.
The goal is to suggest that it's unpatriotic to criticize the
president, and to use his heroic image to block any substantive
discussion of his policies.
In fact, those 27 photos grace one of the four most dishonest budgets
in the nation's history -- the other three are the budgets released in
2001, 2002 and 2003.
Just to give you a taste: remember how last year's budget contained no
money for postwar Iraq -- and how administration officials waited
until after the tax cut had been passed to mention the small matter of
$87 billion in extra costs?
Well, they've done it again: earlier this week the Army's chief of
staff testified that the Iraq funds in the budget would cover expenses
only through September.
But when administration officials are challenged about the blatant
deceptions in their budgets -- or, for that matter, about the use of
prewar intelligence -- their response, almost always, is to fall back
on the president's character.
How dare you question Mr. Bush's honesty, they ask, when he is a man
of such unimpeachable integrity?
And that leaves critics with no choice: they must point out that the
man inside the flight suit bears little resemblance to the official
image.
There is, as far as I can tell, no positive evidence that Mr. Bush is
a man of exceptional uprightness.
When has he even accepted responsibility for something that went
wrong?
On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that he is willing to
cut corners when it's to his personal advantage.
His business career was full of questionable deals, and whatever the
full truth about his National Guard service, it was certainly not
glorious.
Old history, you may say, and irrelevant to the present.
And perhaps that would be true if Mr. Bush was prepared to come clean
about his past. Instead, he remains evasive.
On "Meet the Press" he promised to release all his records -- and
promptly broke that promise.
I don't know what he's hiding.
But I do think he has forfeited any right to cite his character to
turn away charges that his administration is lying about its policies.
And that is the point:
Mr. Bush may not be a particularly bad man, but he isn't the paragon
his handlers portray.
Some of his critics hope that the AWOL issue will demolish the Bush
myth, all at once.
They're probably too optimistic -- if it were that easy, the tale of
Harken Energy would have already done the trick.
The sad truth is that people who have been taken in by a cult of
personality -- a group that in this case includes a good fraction of
the American people, and a considerably higher fraction of the
punditocracy -- are very reluctant to give up their illusions.
If nothing else, that would mean admitting that they had been played
for fools.
Still, we may be on our way to an election in which Mr. Bush is judged
on his record, not his legend.
And that, of course, is what the White House fears.
_____________________________________________________
Questions have been asked. Bush continues to obfuscate.
Harry
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