What Is Your Government Not Telling You?

The money we talk about in Washington, D.C., is not the government's money," said President Bush, celebrating the imminent passage of his latest tax cut, as he liberated an estimated $22 million from the party faithful at a fund raiser in the nation's capital last week. "The money we talk about in Washington, D.C., is the people's money." Bush used this formulation throughout the 2000 campaign, and I always found it a bit confusing. It sounded as if the Federal Government were a toxic fungus implanted upon the banks of the Potomac by communists, space aliens or Hollywood celebrities and not, in the words of history's greatest Republican, "of the people, by the people, for the people."

But then, on the eerie afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush's counselor Karen Hughes appeared at FBI headquarters--the President had just touched down at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska--and announced that "your Federal Government continues to function effectively." The pronoun was almost as astonishing as the sentiment, but the moment of common purpose seems to have passed. The war is over, sort of, an election looms, and the President has once again orphaned the government--it's not ours anymore, and certainly not his. Bush, who seemed so focused when it came to kicking out Saddam, has reverted to his casual disdain for the nonmilitary aspects of federal governance. He has passed another tax cut, filled with trickery and guaranteed to run up huge deficits. And he has lost his way in Iraq, allowing the less dramatic but far more challenging postwar period to become a dangerous mess.

On the latter point, here are some of the things your Federal Government was doing last week. The military imposed an assault-weapons ban on anarchic Baghdad (even as Representative Tom DeLay of Texas recently let slip that Congress won't renew one at home). It was disclosed that the Central Intelligence Agency is trying to figure out, among other things, how we came to the questionable conclusion that Saddam Hussein possessed massive stocks of illegal weapons. The CIA will surely look into the activities of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, an intelligence nodule created by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to provide a hawkish counterforce against the other spy services. The Pentagon's extreme threat assessment, which relied heavily on dubious reports from Iraqi defectors, carried the day in the White House.