Look, these are real issues. If you look back over my posts, I have often been the first to throw tomatoes at Bush when he, as one writer put it so well, "springs another rat out of his hat."

Look at the list so far from the article:

...steel tariffs, the free-spending farm-bill, the explosion in federal domestic spending, the abandonment of Social Security and tort reform, and of course the new prescription drug entitlement--whose costs, as we learned Friday, are now estimated at $534 billion over ten years, 30% more than was predicted when the new entitlement was submitted to Congress last year.

Add to this the immigration flap, the increases for the NEA, and something I just read today, possible support for sugar price fixing, a longtime corporate welfare scam ranking up there with the corn/ethanol industry.

On the plus side, his defense policies are effective, and his tax cuts are improving the economy. Two pluses against a lot of minuses, but they are big pluses.

I frankly don't know where this is all going to end up. The economy will do better than predicted, but this will not show up for a while. Every Democrat, based on their campaign proposals so far, would spend far more money than Bush is. Most would nationalize health care. You can imagine what they would do to my taxes. None of them, except maybe Lieberman, would properly deal with our defense needs. All of them would shriek like banshees if Bush actually cut spending in almost any domestic area.

In other words, the Democrats have absolutely no real interest in cutting back government. The deficit is just a weapon they can use to get the Presidency back, and consistency means nothing to them. Kind of like their sudden discovery that not going to Vietnam means someone is not qualified to be President, a revelation that somehow escaped them for eight years.