I thought today's Krugman article, entitled That Magic Moment, is a good response to this.
The first paragraphs of the article are entirely about the war. They are entirely about misleading the public about WMD's. They are about how confused a majority of BOTH PARTIES in the public were just before the election. They are about the lies told by Iraq's interim prime minister.
But then there's the second half of the article, which starts:
Maybe we can't hold Mr. Bush directly to account for
misleading the public about Iraq. But Mr. Bush still has a
domestic agenda, for which the lessons of Iraq are totally
relevant.
White House officials themselves concede - or maybe boast -
that their plan to sell Social Security privatization is
modeled on their selling of the Iraq war. In fact, the
parallels are remarkably exact.
And then the article goes on to talk about the crisis mongering, the politicization of the agencies, and finally...
Still, there are two reasons why the selling of Social
Security privatization shouldn't be another slam dunk.
One is that we're not talking about secret intelligence;
the media, if they do their job, can check out the numbers
and see that they don't match what Mr. Bush is saying. (A
good starting point is Roger Lowenstein's superb survey in
The Times Magazine last Sunday.)
The other is that we've been here before. Fool me once ...
I think it's important for everyone not to forget that there is a war going on in Iraq, and people are dying IN VAIN. I think it's important for everyone to realize that an enemy made a vicious attack ON AMERICAN SOIL in 2001, and that enemy has been let off the hook for this.
However, I really think it's important that people notice that George W. Bush is trying to derail an important government program, and he's using the same tactics as he did to derail important foreign policy. I think it's important for people to actually **USE** the resources that NOW **ARE** available to them to evaluate (and invalidate) Bush's crazy ideas.
Most importantly, while I think it's important for everyone to realize that GWBush is a BAD president running a BAD administration, it's more important for people to realize that he's about to get MUCH WORSE.
If enough people truly feel this way, Bush will lose much of his congressional support, and it will make it that much harder for him to do that much worse in the upcoming 4 years.
(and on a related note... so now we're going to send airstrikes into Iran, huh? (at least says one of the veteran reporters who came out with the Abu Ghraib story before many other agencies) Granted, we probably should have looked at Iran more closely in 2001... But it now looks like we're going to bomb them for completely unrelated reasons... and while our military is spread thin. On the TV show [i]24[/i] the administration has just decided to bomb U.S. soil to kill its OWN Secretary of Defense in order to prevent the U.S. from being embarassed. Talk about FICTION. (this is not intended to be a threat, secret service web bots))
(I do realize that Anthron was saying that the administration should stop thinking about social security and continue thinking about fixing the war in Iraq... However, I do think that something needs to be done SOON about the social security problem (just not what Bush is suggesting) or else in 40 years the problem will be unfixable... so I'm suggesting that people PAY ATTENTION to social security **AND** the war)
Technorati Tags: krugman, paul krugman, nytimes
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