Kiss My Black Ass

Budget edition.

Bush’s spending plan would make his first-term tax cuts permanent, at a cost of $1.6 trillion over 10 years. He is seeking $78 billion in savings in the government’s big health care programs — Medicare and Medicaid — over the next five years.

Washington Post:

The president’s budget would also reduce spending for Medicare and Medicaid, the federal government’s health programs for the elderly and the poor, by about $100 billion over five years. And it would provide insufficient extra cash to maintain coverage for poor children currently enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

A more moderate series of proposals failed to pass the 109th Congress, which had a Republican majority. I will let the readers guess what the hell the president was thinking.

via Steve Benen.

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Bush seems determined to get some real mileage out of the waning weeks of his Congressional majority. First it was John Bolton and the domestic wiretapping acts, not it’s a panel of judges so far out there that even Republicans have their doubts:

After calling for bipartisanship, President Bush surprised Senate Democrats with plans to renominate a controversial list of judges – some of whom may be unacceptable even to a few Republican senators. “It’s an unfortunate signal,” said one senior Democratic Senate aide.

[…] Lawmakers and others had been waiting to see whether Bush would renominate four particularly controversial appeals court candidates whose nominations had expired without Senate action. He did. The four include two nominees to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond: Terrence Boyle, a district court judge in North Carolina and a former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, and Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes, who became a symbol of the Bush administration’s policies on terrorism, interrogations and other wartime powers. In addition, William Myers, a lobbyist and critic of environmental rules, was renominated for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, and Michael Wallace of Mississippi, rated unqualified for the appeals court by an American Bar Association panel, was renominated for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.

Looks like last Wednesday’s open hand of bipartisanship really was a finger. Fortunately these gestures mostly amount to one angry has-been raging, raging against the dying of his light. With Trent Lott now #2 in the Senate GOP the president won’t find many friends in either caucus, in either house. Sad times for a guy whose image begins and ends with projecting strength.

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Jonah Goldberg:

I think James Baker and Dick Cheney should take Bush out to the woods around Camp David. After 24 hours in a sweat lodge, he should be given only a loin cloth, a hunting knife and a canteen of water. Bush should then set out to track and kill a black bear, after which he should eat its still beating heart so he can absorb its spirit. He should then fly back to Washington in Marine 1. His torso still scratched from the bear’s claws, his face bloodied and steaming in the November chill, he should immediately give a press conference at which he throws the bearskin on the front row of the press corps, completely enveloping Helen Thomas, declaring, “I’m not going anywhere.”

This will send important messages to Democrats and well as to our enemies overseas, who are no doubt high-fiving as we speak.

Leaving aside that Goldberg has seemingly gone feral, this says quite a lot about what to expect from the president and his remaining supporters.

Let’s outline the president’s current situation. Bush has gleefully broken any number of laws for which he has escaped accountability only because the faintest hint of oversight would have killed off the past Republican Congress faster than sunlight to a vampire. Now, unexpectedly (no doubt Rove spun convincing yarns about a lasting majority), oversight is on its way. In spades. The question isn’t whether the president has any Watergates hiding in his closet but how many and how long before the first documents spin their way into the press. The boy president understands as well as anybody that there’s trouble coming down the pike.

This makes the administration’s Nixon fixation timely and more than a bit ironic. Cheney, Addington and the rest took from Watergate the comically misinformed idea that Nixon gave up too easily, which helps explain the veep’s remarkably thorough refusal to share information of any sort. The makeup of Cheney’s energy panels, the names of the Vice President’s staff, his daily schedule, all disappear into the black hole. But, contra Addington’s addled assertions, fighting would have done Nixon no good when he could only look forward to losing an impeachment trial. Nixon resigned because he knew that he had hemorrhaged too much support to keep himself afloat any longer.

Maybe Bush will settle for following the Dems’ lead in the hopes that he can ride out two years without anything impeachable coming to light. It might even work. But if trouble comes Bush can expect precious little from moderate Republicans who haven’t yet been booted by primary challengers or the electorate at large. For the two wooden nickels it’s worth Bush’s only support will come from the fire-breathing partisans represented by Goldberg’s paean to combative peevishness, the angry right who cannot or will not adjust to life in the minority. In comedy they say play to who’s laughing. Right now beside scattered chuckles from Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt the room sits in a cold, stony silence.

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