Give us a break, David:

In David Broder's Aug 6 essay about the similarities (!) between Bush and FDR, W's New Deal? , we read: (emphasis added)

But there is one big difference ...   We know how the New Deal turned out. It was a smashing political success ...

We can't yet know how Bush's experiments, bold as they may be, will work out either substantively or politically.

That's bad enough, claiming ignorance about the likely outcome of Bush's "experiments". But Broder wrote the following, just two weeks earlier: (emphasis added)

• ... almost everyone who is not directly engaged in defending [Bush's deficits] found the long-term implications of the massive borrowing scary as hell.
  
  
• The Concord Coalition, a bipartisan budgetary watchdog group, gave Congress and the administration an "F" on fiscal policy, saying it was characterized by "deficits, deception and denial."
  
  
• Carol Cox Wait, the Republican president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget since it was founded in 1981 to battle "the specter of historically large, seemingly endless, structural budget deficits," chose last week to announce her resignation, explaining, "I have been there and done that."
  
  
• ... the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) said that even if the economy recovers in the next year, as the administration assumes, annual budget deficits will not come down below $300 billion -- and then balloon after 2008 when the baby-boom retirees begin draining Medicare and Social Security. With lots of data, all these groups argue, as CBPP puts it, "The current fiscal policy path is neither manageable nor sustainable."

And then goes on to remark that perhaps we need somebody like Ross Perot to inform the nation of the problem.

Yet Broder still insists that "We can't yet know how Bush's experiments ... will work out"

Try reading your own columns, David.

posted by Quiddity at 8/07/2003 09:05:00 PM