Neverland

For a while I have been trying to think of a word to describe President Bush’s public relations strategy. Nothing had been coming to me until I watching Finding Neverland with Baby a few days ago. I will now call the president’s approach the Peter Pan method — it consists mainly of making something true by believing it a lot and out loud. For example, despite continued dreadful conditions in Iraq, the insurgency is in it’s “last throws,” the present administration practices true “spending restraint,” and Bush doesn’t condone torture.

The president and most of Congress lives in fantasy world like the one that J.M. Barrie created for the four sons of his true love. Only this world is created for special interest groups, moral conservatives, big spending legislators, and neoconservatives. Here’s a good example, President Bush and Congress have restrained spending so much that it has only grown by 33% during his tenure.

Today, we know that compassionate conservatism is really just big government and changing the tone means his veto pen is buried under the ground. The last four years, total spending has risen 33 percent - a figure larger than Clinton’s two terms combined. Adjusted for inflation, one would have to go back to Lyndon Johnson to find a larger increase. Moreover, real discretionary spending increases in FY2002, FY2003, FY2004 and FY2005 are 4 of the 10 biggest annual increases in the last 40 years.

Someone needs to find that man a pen and a stamp ASAP. We can’t afford to live in Washington’s collective dreamland anymore. For so many reasons.