<![CDATA[Consistency Revisited II]]>they? I simply do not recall their loud protests as the Bush administration very clearly embarked on a program of fiscal recklessness from 2001 on. Sure, like the Obama administration, the Bushies did have to worry about a recession after 9/11; but their profligacy pre-dated it and continued well past recovery. Partisan bloggers kept mum at the time out of deference to the GOP. So did National Review and the Weekly Standard - the very organs now fulminating against spending when it's done by a Democrat in his first year in the teeth of the worst recession since the 1930s. But the Dish's record is in plain view. Here I am in March 2003 on the problem of spending:

I've been trying to give [Bush] the benefit of the doubt, but his latest budget removes any. He's the most fiscally profligate president since Nixon. He's worse than Reagan, since he's ratcheting up discretionary spending like Ted Kennedy and shows no signs whatever of adjusting to meet the hole he and the Republican Congress are putting in the national debt.

I'm also staggered that the budget does not contain any mention of the looming war. I guess you could make a semantic point about its not being inevitable - but not even as a possible contingency? Is that how an ordinary citizen plans his own budget?]]>