Three – one to write the press release, a second to fax it to Fox and a third to deliver the “news”… all the while sitting in the dark.
Maybe I should add a fourth to blame Clinton and/or Hussein for the darkness…
Krugman uses both the irresponsible borrow and spend budget policies and the foreign policy fiasco of trying to go it alone on the cheap to exemplify the Bush regime’s loose tether to reality. That’s what happens when you give the keys to ideological whackjobs—they didn’t let reality intrude on their picnic before, so why should they now? Working people barely getting by and unable to afford health care for their kids? Not too much different from military families (and weekend warriors) being told not to worry about a few military deaths every day or so… at least from the Bush “I don’t give a damn for peons” perspective.
This Can’t Go On
Academic economists often cite Stein's Law, a principle enunciated by the late Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Nixon administration. The law comes with various wordings; my favorite is: "Things that can't go on forever, don't." Believe it or not, that's a useful reminder.
For we're now led by men who think that macho posturing makes Stein's Law go away. On issues ranging from budgets to foreign policy, they insist that we can sustain the unsustainable. And when challenged to explain how, they engage in magical thinking.
The prime example I have hammered on in this column is, of course, the federal budget.…
Such explosive growth in debt can't go on forever, and it won't. Yet our current leaders and their apologists insist that the problem will magically solve itself....
But the day of reckoning seems closer on a different front.…
For sure, good things are happening in Iraq. But are we making the kind of progress that would allow us to withdraw large numbers of soldiers, and greatly reduce casualties, in the fairly near future? That's a hard case to make.
Yet we keep expecting a magic solution. We'll get European, Indian and Pakistani forces to help us! But since we went to war without international support, they're not interested. We'll bring in the Turks! But the Iraqi Governing Council itself is bitterly opposed. We'll engage in "Iraqification," creating local forces that take the place of American troops! Let's hope that works — but hope is not a plan.
Just as the federal government is in no immediate danger of running out of money, our forces in Iraq are in no danger of outright defeat. But in both cases, current policies appear to be unsustainable: we can't go on like this indefinitely. And things that can't go on forever, don't.
5:54:09 PM 
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