Clowns To The Left Of Me

"Jokers to the right, and here I am, stuck in the middle with you." This is exactly where George didn't want to be. Needs to cut Medicare costs, but won't cut the cost of his new drug plan because that would be admitting a mistake. Knight-Ridder (02.06.06):

"President Bush tapped the brakes on Medicare spending Monday, but kept his right foot on the accelerator in a move that's likely to frustrate both political fringes but do nothing to ease anxiety over the program's mushrooming long-term costs.

Bush proposed curbing the growth of projected Medicare spending by $36 billion over five years. White House aides noted that it would still grow by 7.5 percent a year - driven not least by the cost of Bush's new prescription-drug benefit."

Medicare seen as a political liability for Bush

"Bush's expansion of Medicare in 2003 to help the elderly pay for prescription drugs, a keystone achievement of his first term, has become a political albatross. Republicans initially thought it would help Bush take the health care issue off the table as an issue favoring Democrats, but once the drug benefit went into effect on Jan. 1, many Americans became confused and angry about it. A recent Gallup Poll found that 58 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with Medicare, and only 35 percent were satisfied."

Conservatives are crabby. They're bitching "that Bush's drug benefit is the biggest expansion of a government entitlement since Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. Many are bitter that the Bush White House concealed the program's true costs from Congress while promising that it wouldn't exceed $400 billion and forcing Congress to vote on it."

They're also pissed that "the benefit's growing price tag - now estimated to be $724 billion over 10 years, and perhaps $2 trillion over the following decade...will be difficult to defend, particularly in the conservative-dominated primaries that will pick the 2008 Republican presidential nominee."

All politics; no policy. Ron Suskind (01.01.03):

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,' says [former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives John] DiIulio. 'What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm.'

'It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.'"

Why Are These Men Laughing?

But what if we reverse the polarity on the flux capacitor?