It's Tokenism Time....

The Decider's sloganeers are turning their Machiavellian attentions to their leader's red-ink federal budget.

"Burden Set to Shift On Balanced Budget," to the new Democratic-majority Congress.

This shifting of blame and counterfeit fiscal leadership stance should be laughable in its political transparency.

But, Bush is counting on a Rovian propaganda campaign to convince voters that HIS goals are to balance the federal budget, even though he has presided over record deficits while aggressively cutting taxes the past six years, even keeping the $2 billion weekly cost of the Iraq war off of the massively-unbalanced books.

The weeks-old Democratic-led Congress has already made sweeping changes toward a budget-balancing "PayGo" plan and reining in earmarks and spending legislation. Bush wants to hijack their progress and corral fiscal responsibility as his own initiative.

With the GOP-majority Congress, a tsunami of earmarks and corporate welfare bills whizzed pass The Decider's veto pen.... and maybe even worse, his big-business buddies and mill-billionaires received the bulk of his horn-tooting tax cuts and policy breaks.

In truth, the amount of monies irresponsibly raided from the Social Security trust fund piggy bank will shrink as the baby boomers start to retire. As the U.S. comptroller general David Walker points out, the government is living far beyond its means. Something must change.

The Decider's solution for this and all of his spending shortfalls, however packaged, will be for all of his tax cuts to be extended while cutting Social Security and Medicare.... leaving it to the Democrats and like-minded fiscal conservatives, to find a way out of his spend and tax-cuts black hole.

Now, instead of the administration's fiscal approach as articulated by VP Cheney in 2002 that "Deficits don't matter," we'll be fed a new mantra, something like "Forward Into Fiscal Responsibility" or some such slogan nonsense.

It'll be left to the Democratic-led Congress to do the fiscal-responsibility heavy lifting.

Expect lots of budget posturing and pronouncements from The Decider's State of the Union speech next week, but count on very little actual Bush administration policy change... the rich will get richer as the poor get poorer.

Equitably working their way out of the budget mess will take more than just sloganeering, and the Bush administration just isn't up to the job.