Bush's Broken Promises

Here's a good, blistering editorial in today's New York Times that mocks Bush and his much ballyhooed plan the Millenium Challenge Account, which should be doling out $5 billion a year by 2006 to the poor countries (mostly in Africa and Latin America) that put in place common sense reform and work towards development. As always, Bush announces big numbers and then quietly cuts back funds after the spotlight moves on.

They tubthump this project all over the world as an example of the USA doing good. But how much have they doled out since starting the MCA last year? Not one dime. Zero. Zip. Nada. A number of countries have qualified according to Bush's lackeys, but none of them have seen any greenbacks. This echoes what Bush did about AIDS in Africa -- callously using the worst plague in our lifetimes to pretend he was a compassionate conservative and then DEFUNDING international groups already on the ground trying to fight the disease and save lives, refuse to back generic drugs because he'd rather send funds to pharmaceutical companies than save three times as many lives (the cost difference between name brands and generics) and finally demanding that science and common sense be abandoned by refusing to work with any project that mentions condoms.

Paul Krugman details today how Bush lies when he pretends black Americans are shortchanged by Social Security. Bush just wants to spend trillions to switch to a privatization plan and he's willing to con black Americans into thinking the system is stacked against them. (His lie is based on the fact that so many black people die at a young age.) But why let facts get in the way?