"Bush Gets Sullied": Andrew Sullivan on Bush's "Moral Values"

[BurtWorm]

Bob Somerby points readers of the Daily Howler to Andrew Sullivan's blog, not to trash "Sullie" as he usually does, but to applaud him for once for stating the obvious:


http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_01_02_dish_archive.html#110479077926607108

BUSH AND MORAL VALUES: Here's a simple question: isn't it a matter of morals not to fiddle the books? The Bush administration has made some promising noises about reducing domestic spending in the last couple of months, but this news is not encouraging:

To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, White House officials are preparing a budget that will assume a significant jump in revenues and omit the cost of major initiatives like overhauling Social Security. To make Mr. Bush's goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year's actual shortfall of $413 billion. By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.

How can anyone take this administration's fiscal intentions seriously when it engages in this kind of flim-flam? We're now used to the fact that the administration doesn't count the war in its fiscal calculations (what's a few hundred billion when it's other people's money?), but that doesn't make it any the less preposterous. And the strong case for partly privatizing social security is undermined by the president's inability to concede that it will require serious short-term borrowing. All of this is as much a moral failure as an economic one, which is why I'm still befuddled by the anemic conservative outrage. Or is sex the only area in which Republicans care about morality?

[robbedvoter]

1. One more for Sully: the Social Security is enrinizing the loans they took

welching on the debts:


http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_01_02.php#004327
(snip)
But about $3 trillion of those dollars we needed to fund the 1980s and 1990s deficits we managed to borrow closer to home. We borrowed it from the Social Security (and a few other government) trust fund(s).

Almost the entirety of President Bush's Social Security phase-out plan comes down to a simple proposition: finding out how not to pay it back.

[skypilot]

2. "Or is sex the only area in which Republicans...."

Major fucking DUH!!!! Is he JUST getting around to asking this question? Who here hasn't known the answer to that for years now?

[Bouncy Ball]

3. Who did Andrew Sullivan vote for on November 2?

Hmmm?

[PROGRESSIVE1]

4. He's not a citizen, so fortunatly, he couldn't vote.

[Bouncy Ball]

5. Really? I didn't know that--

what country is he a citizen of?

[skypilot]

7. He's a Brit.

*

[jerryster]

10. Are you sure?

I read 2 articles he wrote that appeared back to back. The first was titled "Why I want to vote for Bush" and laid that out. The second, however, was titled " But why I can't". It boiled down to Sullivan's abhorrence of Bush's stance on gays and gay marriage. Sullivan wrote that Bush is on the wrong side of the civil rights issue of our time.

Anyway, it seems that he would have acknowledged somewhere in those articles that he couldn't vote anyway. He didn't.

[skypilot]

11. He's a Republican.

Were you expecting clarity and forthrightness from him. Tsk. Tsk.

[imenja]

12. he is a citizen

and he voted for Kerry. He said so publicly. The guy is Republican but couldn't tolerate Bush's anti-gay positions. Sullivan has been a long time supporter of the Iraq war.

[BurtWorm]

9. He was actually unusually anti-Bush this season.

Abu Ghraib was a turning point for him, I think.

[housewolf]

13. He supported Kerry

I think it broke his heart to not support the republican candidate,, but he just couldn't support Bush, as much as he had supported the war in Iraq and was a strong Bush supporter until recently.

[Annus Horribilis]

14. I Don't Know If He Voted

But he supported Kerry.

[skypilot]

6. And I love this bit of sophistry:

And the strong case for partly privatizing social security is undermined by the president's inability to concede that it will require serious short-term borrowing.

The "strong case" isn't undermined by Bush's inability to concede the fact that it will require serious short-term borrowing. It is undermined by the necessity for serious short-term borrowing itself, period.

[BurtWorm]

8. Well said!

:toast: