The Daily Howler Is Inspired Again To Cover The Bush Lies

A CULTURE OF LYING (PART 3)! Candidate Bush lied in Lehrer’s face. The press struggled hard not to notice:

DEBATE I, WHEN THE LYIN’ WAS EASY: Already, a Culture of Lying surrounded Bush as he stood on that stage with Al Gore. The hopefuls were staging their first debate, on October 3, 2000, in Boston. “Governor Bush, one minute rebuttal,” Jim Lehrer said, after Gore answered the evening’s first question. Candidate Bush made his first remarks. And he lied right in Jim Lehrer’s face:

BUSH (10/3/00): Well, we do come from different places. And I come from West Texas. I’ve been a governor. A governor is the chief executive officer and learns how to set agendas. And I think you’re going to find the difference reflected in our budgets. I want to take one-half of the surplus and dedicate it to Social Security, one-quarter of the surplus for important projects, and I want to send one-quarter of the surplus back to the people who pay the bills. I want everybody who pays taxes to have their tax rates cut.

Was it true? Did Bush want to use “one-quarter of the surplus for important projects” and “send one-quarter of the surplus back to the people who pay the bills?” Actually, no, he did not. Bush’s budget called for a $1.3 trillion tax cut—and for $474 billion in new spending (ten years). In fact, his tax cut was about three times as big as his new spending proposals. So why was Bush saying that his new spending equaled the size of his tax cut? According to Gore, Bush’s tax cuts were so large that they left little money for “important new projects.” So Bush had crafted a bogus sound-bite which made it seem that this just wasn’t so.

Part 2

Part 1