New heights of surrealism

From the Washington Post:

The administration has been secretive about the cost of the war and the likely impact that the bulging defense budget and continuing cost of tax cuts will have on domestic spending next year. The White House put government agencies on notice this month that if Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include $2.3 billion in spending cuts from virtually all domestic programs not mandated by law, including education, homeland security and others central to Bush's campaign. [emphasis added.]

But Bush has had little to say about belt-tightening and sacrifice on the campaign trail. Nor has he explained how he would reconcile all his new spending plans with the mounting deficit.

From the same article:

The expansive agenda President Bush laid out at the Republican National Convention was missing a price tag, but administration figures show the total is likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade.

A staple of Bush's stump speech is his claim that his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, has proposed $2 trillion in long-term spending, a figure the Massachusetts senator's campaign calls exaggerated. But the cost of the new tax breaks and spending outlined by Bush at the GOP convention far eclipses that of the Kerry plan.

Yes, you read that correctly. Bush is promising people $3 TRILLION in goodies, at the same time that he's planning to broadly cut government spending, including, amazingly, homeland security. For a lesser man, that might be hypocrisy enough, but not for George; he goes the extra mile and invents a strawman figure that allows him to attack Kerry for wanting to spend too much. (By the way, remind me who it was that spent that surplus we had just a few years ago?)

But for the true artistry in arrogance, you have to pick campaigning on the issue of keeping us safer, when he's already preparing cuts in Homeland Security.