Andrew Sullivan is as Republican as they come, but he knows Bush can't control spending.

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"HOW BUSH COULD LOSE: I'm not sure what to make of the NYT poll yesterday. Obviously, I don't trust NYT polls. But if this one is at all accurate, it's grim news for Rove. The strategy of bankrupting the country to appease various interest groups hasn't worked too well. Bush is still behind on prescription drugs for the elderly - despite a future cost of trillions directed to the wealthiest segment of the population. Despite booming growth and productivity rates, Bush still gets a net negative on the economy. It's even stevens on Iraq. The president's only real ace is national security - which, during the war on terror, is a big ace. (It's certainly the sole reason I'm still giving the president the benefit of the doubt.) But here's the thing: much of the national security advantage is retroactive. It refers to the admirable way in which Bush responded to 9/11. Looking forward, there's a big opening for a Democrat who wants to say the following: "I want to do more to improve homeland security, put more emphasis on securing loose nukes in Russia and around the world, stay the course on Iraq - but also move to mend fences with old Europe and our other allies. Domestically, I'm going to improve our finances by raising taxes on the very rich, but cutting taxes on the middle class. And, above all, I'll be a check on one-party government in the Congress, and prevent Bush from appointing extremists to the Supreme Court." That's a powerful message. My hunch is that the Democratic primary voters have begun to realize that they've sent their message of anger, but now realize they can win, if they find the right guy. For a cultural liberal, fiscal conservative like me, Bush's only current advantage over a centrist Democrat is his conduct of the war on terror. What we'll see in the next few weeks is if the Dems can see this. It's grim news for Bush if they can."

"ANOTHER FALSE ALARM: No blister gas bombs in Iraq. The absence of any WMDs in any usable form in Iraq is, to my mind, staggering. I'm still passionately pro-war, but you cannot sugar-coat this intelligence debacle. The pre-emption doctrine is practically speaking dead."

"LOST IN SPACE: Thanks for all your emails. I guess I should say I have no problem in principle with government-funded space exploration. But the full costs of this will explode in a decade or so, at exactly the same time that social security is cratering and Medicare is going bankrupt. If the president were proposing means-testing social security, raising the retirement age, restraining Medicare growth, ending subsidies for big agriculture and tackling corporate welfare, I'd be happy to go along with a new space program. But we don't even have a sign that the president even intends to deal with any of this - in fact he has added vast new future liabilities in three short years. The word for that is irresponsible. I think you can defend his fiscal record in the last three years as a function of war and near-depression. But we can now see what he believes in. He has a Congress of the same party. He has to be held accountable for what is being done to the federal budget. He is a more extreme fiscal liberal than anyone we've seen since LBJ."

"AND WHEN IN DOUBT, LIE: Leave it to Rick Santorum to say the following: "I would just suggest we stayed within the budget targets the President has set forth. They are substantially less than what the increases were under the Clinton administration. They are, I would argue, fiscally responsible." Here's the truth: If you take defense and entitlement spending out of the picture altogether (and they have, of course, gone through the roof), Bush and the Republican Congress have upped domestic spending by a whopping 21 percent in three years. That compares with an actual decrease in such spending of 0.7 percent in the first three years of Bill Clinton. Spending on education is up 61 percent; on energy 22 percent; on health and human services 22 percent; on the Labor Department a massive 56 percent. There really is no spinning of this. Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative. George W. Bush is a fiscal liberal of a kind we haven't seen since LBJ. Maybe the Democrats would be worse. But naitonally, the GOP is outspending Democrats wherever they get the chance. A USA Today study found that GOP-controlled state legislatures increased spending an average of 6.54 percent a year from 1997 to 2002, compared with 6.17 percent for legislatures run by Democrats. Fiscal conservatives really have no place to go any more. But if you had to pick, you'd have to support the Democrats."