Ron Suskind is starting to release some of the 19K documents given him by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and yesterday my latest hero Brad DeLong had the following to say about the memo from Treasury Press Secretary Michele Davis to O'Neill instructing him on what to say during the Press Conference releasing Bush's 2001 budget:
[From the memo:] Key background information: The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes. It's crucial that your remarks make clear that there is no trade off here--that we will boost education spending and set aside Social Security and Medicare surplus to address the future of those programs, and still we will have an enormous surplus. This isn't an "either/or" question.
[DeLong translates:] In short: "We don't think like the American people do, we don't value what they value. Thus we have to move quietly and carefully--to reassure them, to tell them probable lies, and so keep them from realizing that our priorities may well turn out to be in sharp conflict with theirs."
The problem being, of course, that it was crystal clear that it was an "either/or" question. Today DeLong continues his discussion of the coached lies in the memo with even more grist for Benj's mill.
I've just started reading Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, and it's a page-turning eye-goggler. So is Alterman and Green's just-published The Book on Bush. These books are both must-reads. We'll be posting on some small portion of the massive cataloguing of administration sins contained therein, but the short story is: buy these books and read them. Then contact your local Democratic party office and sign up -- I don't care how busy you are -- -- to register voters in your area, and especially in areas containing the underrepresented poor/minority areas. We have got to get Bush and his gang out of office.
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