February 3, 2004 - Mr. Bush sent the Republican Congress a declaration of war against the middle class yesterday with his Budget message. It asks the Congress to borrow $520 Billion this year to fund government operations while making permanent the tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest of his patrons. The Bush budget does not include, of course, the direct spending to prosecute its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or its world wide operations in the eternal war on terror. Like his father’s bail out of the Savings and Loan industry those costs are to be handled “off budget” when he comes to Congress with for supplemental spending authority after the November elections.

Faced with David Kay’s excursion off the Republican reservation to tell some of the truth to the American people Mr. Bush has reluctantly embraced the idea of creating an independent commission charged with investigating how his administration misstated and exaggerated the Iraqi weapons excuse to invade and occupy that country. Naturally the commission will be charged with the responsibility to conduct an investigation and report to the people only after the November elections.

Mr. Bush has ordered his administration to cooperate fully with the Kean Commission’s investigation of the factors that led the President to ignore plain warnings and action plans against Al Qaeda terrorism given him in the transition from the Clinton administration until the attacks on the World Trade Towers and Pentagon awakened him to the danger. When his carefully choreographed delays and reluctance to open information made it impossible to meet the May 2004 deadline for the commission’s report he has endorsed an extended deadline to a date in 2005 – after the November elections.

Why after the elections? So that the investigations into and resulting debate over the most important political decisions of his administration, decisions that have impacted and will continue to impact the American people for decades to come, will not be sullied by the intrusion of partisan politics into the fact-finding process. At least that is the rationale that Mr. Bush is pushing to defer and delay any investigation. That is his cover for trying to insure that the electorate does not have access to the facts until after they have gone to the polls. As he once said only half in jest, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones you have to concentrate on.”

The technique works on Congress too. The administration procured passage of its reform plan turning Medicare into a cash cow for the pharmaceutical and HMOs industries by keeping its real costs secret until after the Congress had voted. It held onto the facts so that it could prove that it could fool most of the Congress most of the time.

Well the technique doesn’t seem to be working as well as Mr. Bush hoped. An increasingly restive Republican Congress is beginning to question Mr. Bush’s priorities while the President announces one expensive program after another and says that it is Congress’ responsibility to apply fiscal responsibility. Nor is it working on the electorate either. Most of the people are not being fooled even some of the time and the polls are reflecting their awakening. If Mr. Bush is to secure reelection it won’t be by hiding from the facts or delaying finding them. Sweeping inconvenient embarrassments under the rug won’t work anymore. If he is to arrest his political slide he will have to come clean with the American people and that is something of which Chicken George is incapable.