Kristof gets one right...

[chiburb]

While he can't resist the inevitable slams at Clinton and all the Democratic candidates, he DOES slam BushCo fo his budget lies and profligate spending...

Snip:

If we're serious about confronting threats to our way of life, we don't have to hunt them in the caves of eastern Afghanistan. We can find a serious threat in the West Wing of the White House as the Bush administration charts its fiscal policy.

President Bush's budget policies have mortgaged America, yet instead of repairing the damage, he is intensifying the harm by trying to make his tax cuts permanent. And this week he presented a budget that is so dazzlingly deceitful it does not even attempt to include the bills for our presence in Iraq.

Conservatives have traditionally been the conscience of America's checkbook (and, to their credit, many now are screaming). If Mr. Bush were a genuine conservative, he might cut taxes, but he would cut spending to match. If he were an honest liberal, he might increase spending, and taxes as well. Instead, the president is inviting us out for a wild night on the town and leaving us — and our children — with the bill.

I'm sorry if I sound screechy. But my first beat at this newspaper, in 1984, was covering the Latin American debt crisis. Later I lived in Japan as its economy went from a global juggernaut to a global laughingstock. After you've seen how quickly national leaders can bungle national economies, and how difficult it is to put Humpty Dumpty together again, you have less patience for high-risk intellectual dishonesty like Mr. Bush's fiscal policy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/opinion/04KRIS.html?pagewanted=print&position=

[Dudley_DUright]

1. Glad to see Kristof taking a lesson from Krugman

and covering this disaster of a budget mess. I like when he apologizes for sounding "screechy". The right is always accusing Krugman of being "shrill", so now we have the team of "shrill and screechy", but someone should be screaming about this besides Howard Dean!