Bush Tour Trumps Daschle's Dour Lies
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Dan Frisa
Sunday, Jan. 6, 2002The much-touted doom and gloom litany of economic lies put forth by Senate plurality leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was trumped and trounced by an energetic President George W. Bush, who took direct aim at the Democratic partisan attack during a series of enthusiastic public appearances, vowing to veto any attempt to raise taxes.
Poking holes in the Democrats’ laughable economics, the President questioned how taking more money from people during a recession could possibly help the economy.
He emphatically stated, to sustained applause at stops in California and Oregon, that the way to recovery is to allow taxpayers to keep more of their own money and that Democratic desires to repeal the scheduled, bipartisan tax cuts amounted to a tax increase, something he strongly opposed.
"Over my dead body,” the President declared to a standing ovation.
What’s laughable about the Daschle speech, taken nearly verbatim from a James Carville-inspired political memo circulated to Democrats in Washington recently, is that it’s nothing more than a mountain of lies built on a foundation of lies. (See Desperate Dems Play Politics.)
For instance, blaming the bipartisan, modest tax cuts for worsening the weak economy is a bogus charge, given that the first of numerous rate reductions hasn’t even taken effect yet!
How, then, could it be responsible for deepening the recession, as charged by Daschle?
Simple. Tax cuts have nothing whatever to do with the recession. Tom Daschle knows this, but says it anyway. That’s a lie.
Interesting, isn’t it, that when Vice President-elect Dick Cheney and others spoke about the impending economic downturn before Inauguration Day, the Left and the media went crazy, claiming it was irresponsible to "talk” the economy into recession. (See G-Span to Fix Clinton's Bad Economy).
Of course the truth is that Bill Clinton left the economy on a serious downward spiral, far worse than the steadily increasing economy left to him by President George H. W. Bush in January of 1993.
That was Clinton’s big lie of the ’92 campaign, that "America was experiencing its worst economy in fifty years.”
Does the name Jimmy Carter ring a bell? That knucklehead left office only 16 years before, with an economy so bad a "misery index” had to be created to measure the depths of despair he and a Democratic Congress created.
Only Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts turned that mess around.
And only a Republican Congress, beginning in 1995, instituted the fiscal discipline necessary to inspire record economic growth for the remainder of the Clinton term, where before only deficits as far as the eye could see were in sight.
We grabbed him kicking and screaming to the sanity of responsible governance of the economy. Remember Clinton’s two vetoes of welfare reform? He only dropped his opposition when pollsters such as Dick Morris told him he was wrong.
He also opposed balancing the budget. Remember the video montage of Clinton flip-flopping all over the place with his 10-year, seven-year, eight-year talk of how long it would take to balance the budget?
He was as full of it then as Daschle is now.
It’s also curious that Robert Rubin, who, as treasury secretary, swore to every one of Clinton’s economic lies then, was on hand to do the same for Daschle.
Amazing how such an irresponsible individual is accorded such respect by the media. Yes, he was a successful Wall Street tycoon – during the Reagan boom, by the way – who donated millions to Democrats, but his behavior and conduct, both at Treasury and now, makes him no better than your garden-variety political hack.
But whatever unjustified "credibility” the imprimatur of Rubin brings to Daschle, it doesn’t change the fact that their lies are still lies.
With President Bush articulating the truth and shining a bright spotlight on their blatant political game, the Democrats will soon be slinking back to the drawing board to try to figure out their next move.
Too bad they don’t have the guts to stand up and tell the truth; but that would entail having to own up to the fact that they’re a party bereft of ideas.
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Dan Frisa represented New York in the United States Congress and served four terms in the New York State Assembly.
E-mail Dan: danfrisa@newsmax.com.