More double-talk

It's hard to say what is worst about Bush: the sheer insanity and profligacy of his policies, or his utter debasement of reasoned and logical political discourse - never a strong point of politics in a mass society at the best of times, but now approaching a sub-nursery school level.
This buffoon has been yammering about how Social Security is "flat bust, bankrupt," etc., due to a $10 trillion infinite horizon fiscal gap. Plus more self-congratulatory blather about how he doesn't leave problems for future Americans to deal with, and the people should demand this from their leaders, etc.
Meanwhile, the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit that he strong-armed through Congress, totally unfunded and originally estimated to cost $16.6 trillion in the infinite horizon, is already proving costlier than expected. There is talk in Congress about reducing it - refreshingly, coming in the main from Republicans, who did not want such a huge expansion of government outlays even if they held their noses and went along with it for political reasons.
So we get today the headline: BUSH VOWS VETO OF ANY CUTBACK IN DRUG BENEFIT. He's standing tall to defend what he calls, with characteristic modesty, this "landmark achievement."
The utter debasement of political discourse is shown by the complete impossibility of reconciling these two sets of things that he says within hours, or even I suppose minutes, of each other. There evidently is no need for the man's statements to be even minimally logically consistent and defensible. This is how societies crash and burn - when reasoned discourse has vanished from the decision and discussion process. (Well, maybe I am being too hyperbolic, since this is just Bush, not the totality of our political process.)
The reason he can even try to get away with this inconsistency is that the Medicare prescription drug benefit has no dedicated funding whatsoever. So he can deny that it's "bankrupt, flat bust, broke" because he lacked the minimal responsibility to even try to provide dedicated financing for it. Had he done so and thus been slightly less irresponsible, he would have to treat its condition as worse (even though it would actually have been better), if the dedicated financing proved to be insufficient. But provide zero funding, unlike the case of Social Security, and you are home free.