Hank Paulson's pre-emptive war

Vice President Dick Cheney went to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for a closed-door meeting with House Republicans.

It didn't go well.

The vice president tried to tell the Republican lawmakers that they had to go along with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's three-page legislative proposal to commit the taxpayers to buy $700 billion worth of financial instruments that no one in the financial industry will touch with a ten-foot pole.

Secretary Paulson was on Capitol Hill too, trying to tell the Senate Banking Committee that the $700 billion plan is absolutely and immediately essential to prevent a catastrophic meltdown of the United States economy that will cost Americans their jobs and the houses and their retirement savings.

That didn't go well, either.

So J.R. Ewing might have been wrong after all.

The fictional oil man from the TV series "Dallas" was once asked by an incredulous associate how he could do the things he was doing and he famously answered, "Once you give up your integrity, everything else is a piece of cake."

He might have added that it's important to get canceled in a timely manner, before it all catches up with you.

The Bush administration has been caught in too many lies to count here, but the Iraq war and the Medicare prescription drug coverage might never have happened if the administration had truthfully revealed the information it had at the time. Instead, lawmakers were treated to an edited version of the facts, and administration insiders who revealed any more than that were promptly fired or forced to resign.

Now the administration is back on Capitol Hill with another demand for unprecedented federal government expansion and executive branch authority. They're warning publicly about a deep recession, and privately about a Great Depression, if they don't get what they want. And they want it now, because they say the situation is a crisis, and there's no time for thoughtful hearings or extended public debate.

But hardly anybody believes them any more.

That's the price you pay for lying.

Maybe it's the price we're all going to pay.


Copyright 2008

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