Kaus Goes Off The Deep End
I am beginning to be embarassed to admit that I use to read Mickey Kaus' weblog. His latest gyrations about Paul Krugman and the OMB are just unbelievable. Here are the events in the story:
0. The Bush administration has little credibility in economic matters (see here and here).
1. On July 12, The OMB distributed a press release that severely underestimated the percentage of the decline in the 10-year federal budget surplus caused by the Bush tax cut, claiming it was "less than 15%" rather than the 38 percent shown by the OMB's own data.
2. On July 25, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities sent out a press release catching the error.
3. On July 30, Paul Krugman wrote a column in the NY Times that said that the OMB lied in their press release.
4. On July 31, the OMB wrote a letter to the NY Times saying "The error, retracted weeks ago when noticed, assigned a true number to the wrong time frame" and "My office's first press release mistakenly applied the 10 percent figure to the 10-year estimated surplus, rather than to 2002."
At this point, Kaus took Krugman to task for saying that the OMB had lied when it was just a simple mistake. Krugman offered no proof that the OMB had lied other than references to OMB's repeated less-than-honest antics.
5. Later, Spinsanity talked to Trent D. Duffy, the OMB's communications director, who admitted that retraction was given only to reporters who contacted OMB about the original release -- there has never been a formal published retraction. Duffy also admitted that the release was not changed on the Web site until July 26. Lastly, Duffy admitted that 15 percent is an old, incorrect figure that he accidentally used, not a true number assigned to the wrong time frame.
So, the OMB's letter to the NY Times was a pack of lies. It seems a small step to assume that OMB's original use of the wrong number was not inadvertant. However, Kaus concludes that the OMB admitting (under duress) that they their letter to the NY Times was a pack of lies totally exonerates the OMB! And then Kaus calls the OMB's lying through their teeth a failure "not-entirely-dissimilar" to Krugman's not retracting his accusation that the OMB lied!
Update: Evidence that Kaus has apparently gone completely over to the dark side: he was quoted approvingly by Charles Krauthammer and then Kaus wrote an approving link to a Peggy Noonan story.
10:10:01 PM 
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