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I’m not sure it’s what I should be best known for. What I’m best known for is being one of the first to really say that the Bush administration was not to be trusted. So I was the first—certainly the first major newspaper op-ed type writer to say that because I said that even before the 2000 election was held. So I can go back and point you to columnists from the summer of 2000 that I think foreshadow—at least foreshadow it the way most people know think about the Bush administration before there even was a Bush administration.
I knew some things that most journalists don’t like arithmetic. And so, I was looking at the policy proposals and I just said they’re lying. They’re not being honest about what it is they’re proposing, and that was a pretty good guide to me. It seemed to me that was much better evidence than whether Bush seems like a guy that you wanted to have a beer with.
Social security, Bush was basically counting the same couple of trillion dollars twice. He was saying we can have it available to pay benefits but we can also invest it and we’ll get lots of money out of it, and that didn’t make sense.
Taxes, he was claiming that his tax cuts favor the middle class and you could do the math, they didn’t. They were very much tilted towards the top. And there were bunch of other things, smaller things, but just the clear dishonestly about what was actually in his own policy proposals. And being the kind of guy I am, if you’re lying about the numbers that to me is not really the worst offense but is the clearest sign that you’re not a man that the public should trust. It’s crazy, right? In fact, you are not going to have a beer with the president but you want somebody you can trust to run the nation.
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