Ed Kilgore,
writing over at TMPCafe, gets it exactly right:
Recall George W. Bush's meta-message during the 2000 campaign: it was time for a "responsibility era" to rein in the excesses introduced by the out-of-control Baby Boomer Bill Clinton. The grown-ups, emblemized by Dick Cheney and other Bush 41 exiles, were ready to give America a mature and accountable government.
That has turned out to be the biggest Bush lie of them all.
More after the break...
Has the Bush administration been responsible for anything at all?
Almost every single policy has been based on lies and deception, from understating the impact of the tax cuts, lying about the price tag of the Medicare prescription drug "benefit," twisting the truth about Social Security (even to the point of saying that government bonds are worthless paper), changing reports on global warming, and even lying to Congress and the American people in order to start a war with Iraq.
But what's disappointed me most in this administration is the death of accountability. Bush has taken the golden parachute of the failed CEO and translated it to the White House. No mistake is too big, no lie too brazen to result in any kind of negative consequence. This administration has acted like corporate raiders, stripping the government after a hostile takeover. They promised us "maximizing synergies" and "greater efficiency" and ended up giving us the governmental equivalent of the AOL-Time Warner merger.
The public has gotten fed up with enormous payoffs to CEOs who drive their companies into the ground. Our best hope is that the public gets just as sick of this crap in the government as well.