Shrub Talking About Fiscal Restraint is Like...

...Bill Bennett lecturing about the evils of gambling.

While it's nice to see Pravda-Upon-Hudson occasionally call bullshit, a single editorial versus the mind-numbing repetition of the wingnut noise machine is unfortunately about as effective as a bathtub drain plug against a floodwall breach.

President Bush waited until he had vetoed a relatively inexpensive children’s health insurance bill before asking for tens of billions of dollars more for his misadventure in Iraq. The cynicism of that maneuver is only slightly less shameful than the president’s distorted priorities. Despite a pretense of fiscal prudence, Mr. Bush keeps throwing money at his war, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure or children’s health care.

Mr. Bush is threatening to veto most of the 12 domestic spending bills now before Congress because Democrats want to provide $22 billion more than the $933 billion he has requested. His argument? Something about the president’s responsibility to rein in lawmakers’ “temptation to overspend.”

This from a leader who turns federal surpluses into deficits, believes that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can be financed on a separate set of books with borrowed money, and keeps having to go back to Congress for “emergency funding” because he cannot or will not tell the truth about what it is costing to fight these wars.

And I've got a question not unlike Pravda's own in a subsequent paragraph: if you're spending $400 billion dollars a year on "defense," what do we need extra, off-budget funds for? $400 billion dollars every year is a LOT of money.

Come to think of it, for $400 billion dollars a year, we really should be a lot further along than what amounts to a stalemate in Iraq and Afghanistan...unless that money isn't actually being spent on "defense."