"Mr. President: Did you ever hold conservative notions and assumptions on the issue of spending? If so, did you abandon them after the trauma of 9/11? For what reasons, exactly? Did you intend to revert to conservative thinking on spending at some point? Do you still? Were you always a liberal on spending? Were you, or are you, frankly baffled that conservatives assumed you were a conservative on spending? Did you feel they misunderstood you? Did you allow or encourage them to misunderstand you?" – Peggy Noonan, yesterday, in a column called "Hey, Big Spender."
"In three short years, this President has so ramped up government spending that he has turned a fiscal surplus into a huge and mounting debt. Far from taking responsibility for the nation’s finances, the President has shirked basic housekeeping and foisted crippling debt on the next generation. If a President is in some sense the father of an extended family, Bush is fast becoming a deadbeat dad, living it up for short-term gain while abandoning his children to a life of insecurity and debt." – yours truly, September 15, 2003, in a Time essay called "Come On, Big Spender."
The Dish 