Thank you Dan Froomkin...

Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing column is a must read for me on a daily basis. Add it to you favorites now.



From Today's Edition:

The banner headlines in today's newspapers belong to the stories that dutifully recount the highlights of President Bush's daring State of the Union address.



But the morning news is also alive with little headlines advertising analyses and sidebars that dig deep into the speech's omissions, implications, misrepresentations and contradictions.



Most notably, on the issue of Social Security, many reporters pointed out that Bush warned alarmingly of financial disaster but didn't really say what he wanted to do about it. Instead, he spoke of the importance of personal accounts, which even supporters say wouldn't help.



In fact, careful observers of the run-up to war in Iraq will recognize some similarities in this strategy. Back then, as the president was making an argument for going to war, many critics said that he confused Americans by linking Saddam Hussein to the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11, 2001.



Now the Bush message is: Social Security is going bankrupt; Let's give people private accounts. Doubtless, the president is hoping the public will link those two concepts as well.



Before the speech, a senior administration official spoke at length and on background about Bush's plan for private accounts. He also pretty clearly implied that the White House sees across-the-board benefit reductions in the offing. They just don't want to talk about it.



Here's the transcript of that very important briefing.



When push came to shove, and it did, the official was grudgingly more forthcoming than the president on some key issues. For instance:



"QUESTION: "[A]m I right in assuming . . . that it would be fair to describe this as having -- the personal accounts by themselves as having no effect whatsoever on the solvency issue?



"SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: . . . that's a fair inference. . . .



"QUESTION: But is it fair to say that when everybody wakes up tomorrow morning, the president is not going to have given them an answer tonight about the $3.7 trillion shortfall, and that presumably, since he's ruled out higher taxes, that the deal that he goes along with is going to have to come up with $3.7 trillion worth of benefit cuts?



"SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, I'm not sure I would categorize it that way. . . . "

Read the rest of today's column here.



-The Oklahoma Hippy