Smart bombs: Swapping scripts

Way back when Congress was controlled by Republicans, Democrats bemoaned Iraq war-funding bills that were larded with unrelated pork-barrel spending. These line items could not pass on their own merits, the Dems scolded. It’s an abuse of the budgeting process, they clucked. And just look at that deficit, they added.

Now the Democrats are in charge, and they want to spend at least $21 billion more than the president requested in war funding for the next year. And where will that extra loot go?

The Washington Post reports, “For Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), there is $25 million for spinach growers hurt by last year’s E. coli scare. For three conservative Democrats in Georgia, there is $75 million for peanut storage. For lawmakers from the bone-dry West, there is $500 million for wildfire suppression. An additional $120 million is earmarked for shrimp and Atlantic menhaden fishermen.”

Boasted House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., “We have provided all of the money the president requested – and more.”

The “and more” was being offered in exchange for votes that also establish Aug. 31, 2008, as the deadline for bringing the troops home. This is precisely the kind of vote-buying that Democrats decried not so long ago.

Swapping scripts, Part II. As the Iraq war-funding bill was being considered this week, Majority Leader Hoyer said Democrats might hold open the vote for longer than the allotted time as they hunted for converts, according to Politico.com.

So guess which Democrat said this in 2004, after a 15-minute vote was allowed to stretch to 38 minutes:

“These back-alley tactics have no place in the greatest deliberative body in the world.”

Scandal, by the numbers. “Bush 8; Clinton 93.” That’s the headline the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran with a commentary by conservative media critic L. Brent Bozell III, who sums up a popular rebuttal to the prosecutors purge controversy this way:

“The media think the eight dismissals were a scandal so massive that some have begun calling on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. But they thought the 93 Clinton firings were not worth investigating for the length of a cigarette break.”

It’s true that many articles haven’t mentioned that. Just as they haven’t noted other irrelevancies, such as the fact that President Clinton dumped the previous administration’s Cabinet. He even brought in his own first lady, but whether she served at the pleasure of the president is debatable.

Bozell’s spin isn’t even accurate. Clinton replaced 89 of 93 U.S. attorneys in the first two years, according to Friday’s Los Angeles Times. In the same time frame, Reagan also replaced 89 and the current president replaced 88.

So the headline should read: “Bush 8; Bush 88; Clinton 89; Reagan 89”. So what sticks out? Yes, it’s the “Bush 8.” It is unusual for a president to sack his own nominees for anything other than misconduct. Hence, the media attention.