Another Sneaky Stolberg Slam

In her ongoing quest to make our red state president look legitimate, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times communicates more nonsense in her profile of Ed Gillespie, who is once more pulling Repug strings in an effort to perpetuate confrontation every chance he gets.

Bringing Gillespie on board, by the way, was a “by the numbers” move for a regime that has nothing whatsoever to offer for this country except the almighty “base,” thus making way for diversionary attacks of the opposition dutifully spun by our corporate media as politics as usual (but of course, when the Dems do anything like this, along comes David Broder and the Robertses to say "tut tut" and preach about how wonderful it is to achieve a "consensus," provided it's approved by the Repugs, of course).

Anyway, Stolberg brought us the following today, again regarding Gillespie and his way of doing business…

And Democrats have provided targets, by waiting until two months into the new fiscal year to finish their appropriations work. Mr. Bush has already vetoed Democratic measures on children’s health and Iraq war spending, and a water resources bill — all the while complaining lawmakers are wasting taxpayers’ money, and scolding them like errant schoolchildren who forgot to turn in their homework.

Uh…I think Ms. Stolberg should take a look at the information Kagro X of The Daily Kos provides from this link (should be required reading for all members of the corporate press). As you can see, George W. Milhous Bush had every intention of vetoing primarily-Democratic-sponsored appropriations bills dating back to last summer, and prior to that actually. The phrase “waiting until two months into the new fiscal year to finish their appropriations work” (presumably talking about a month ago) is inaccurate to the point of propagandistic.

Stolberg also communicates the following…

On the budget, Mr. Gillespie looked back to the Republican defeat of 1995. “We saw how Clinton did it, using the power of the presidency,”’ (David) Hobbs (a friend of Gillespie and fellow Repug lobbyist) said.

Mr. Armey said Mr. Gillespie had argued that his party would lose because the public believed Republicans were antigovernment, “so therefore it is credible to argue Republicans shut government down.”

He said Mr. Gillespie’s strategy was to “understand the public’s already conceived disposition,” and create a story line around it.

That strategy was on full display in the Rose Garden last week, as Mr. Bush tapped into another preconceived notion, that lawmakers are lazy. The president opened his remarks by tweaking Democrats on the 30-second pro forma sessions they held to prevent him from making recess appointments over the Thanksgiving Day holiday.

“If 30 seconds is a full day,” Mr. Bush said, “no wonder Congress has got a lot of work to do.”

It was positively Gillespie-esque.

I don’t know exactly how to respond to a crack like that except to note the following (dated October 1, 2003, comparing the vacation time taken by Dubya to his predecessor - at the bottom)…

…in barely three years in office, George W. Bush has already taken more vacation than Clinton did in seven years.

The good thing about this article, full of hosannas to Gillespie and Dubya, is that it was buried in the back of the first section of the print edition.

The bad thing is that it was published in print at all.