THE WASTREL SON OF A BUSH

What in the world did we do before Paul Krugman began writing opinion for The New York Times?

But the tone of the cover letter Mr. Bush sent with last week's budget request can best be described as contemptuous: it's up to Congress to "ensure that our men and women in uniform continue to have the resources they need when they need them." This from an administration that, by rejecting warnings from military professionals, ensured that our men and women in uniform didn't have remotely enough resources to do the job.

The budget request itself was almost a caricature of the administration's "just trust us" approach to governing.

It ran to less than a page, with no supporting information. Of the $25 billion, $5 billion is purely a slush fund, to be used at the secretary of defense's discretion.

More detail of the supplemental:

According to the request, the $25 billion would be placed in a fund Bush would control. He could decide how the money would be spent, as long as he informed Congress that his request was "an emergency and essential to support activities and agencies in Iraq or Afghanistan."

So in other words, we're supposed to trust Bush to spend our money, as long as he informs Congress what he is doing with it. But since he has a long history of NOT informing Congress about anything regarding money (see this earlier post, I don't have a real comfort level with that. Congress should demand, as the least condition for passing this supplemental, an accounting of the $79- and $87-billion-dollar supplementary appropriations, especially the $9.8 billion slush fund that Rumsfeld was given to spend pretty much as he pleased. It's pretty nervy of Bush to be running ads misleading the American public that Kerry "voted against" body armor for our troops -- after all, he GOT the money despite Kerry's vote, but some of our troops are STILL without armored vehicles and body armor -- so where did the $87 billion go?

This administration has a problem not only with accountability, but with accounting. But don't believe me, ask Richard Foster or L.E. Brown.