You start to understand after a while why Mitch Daniels — Director of the Office of Management and Budget — got his post in the Bush administration. He excels at the sort of macho head-butting and white boy trash talk that is apparently the coin of the realm inside the second Bush White House.
Here’s Daniels yesterday on This Week denouncing the idea of the Medicare Trust fund as set forth by Senator Kent Conrad:
You know, raising four daughters has taught me a little about patience, but I’m starting to lose mine on this issue of Medicare. The point of view that the senator has expressed was described this week by various journalists as ‘ridiculous, false, Orwellian, and an attempt to confuse the public, deserving of our contempt.’ And let me tell you why …
And here’s Daniels explaining why giving the surplus back to the American people, as conservatives like to say, is the right thing to do. And how giving the surplus back to the American people is also the best way to protect the surplus.
First of all, let’s note that the surplus is smaller very much on purpose. That’s because President Bush and a bipartisan majority chose to share some of this large overcharge with the American people
The president chose … to share a large part of the remaining surplus with the taxpayers who sent it in. It’s a refund of a big overcharge … And we now know a sputtering economy needs that money to revive and protect the surpluses of the future.
So the surplus is the people’s money, and they should get it back. And that’ll protect the surplus.
Okay.
And here’s Daniels on the finer points of tactical dishonesty …
I think frankly that Medicare lockbox fiction, which is what it is, was of some value early on in its life during a time of deficits, when it’s [Republican] authors, I think, believed they were going to prevent the then Clinton administration from spending all that money …
Like I said, you start to understand why he got the assignment.
