{"id":6982,"date":"2006-03-28T10:42:10","date_gmt":"2006-03-28T15:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6982"},"modified":"2006-03-28T10:42:10","modified_gmt":"2006-03-28T15:42:10","slug":"meet-josh-bolten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/meet-josh-bolten\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Josh Bolten"},"content":{"rendered":"

To follow up on my earlier post<\/a> on [tag]Andy Card[\/tag]’s [tag]resignation[\/tag], I think it’s also worth mentioning that his successor, former OMB Director [tag]Joshua Bolten[\/tag], is getting a pretty big promotion despite not having much success on the job. The president said<\/a> this morning:<\/p>\n

“With me today is Joshua Bolten, who will be the new White House Chief of Staff. Josh is a man with broad experience, having worked on Capitol Hill and Wall Street and the White House staff, and for nearly three years as a Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Josh is a creative policy thinker. He’s an expert on the budget and our economy.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess it depends on what one means by “expert.” As the president’s budget director, [tag]Josh Bolten[\/tag] has helped add $2 trillion<\/a> to the national debt in less than three years. He’s also helped oversee a dramatic rise<\/a> in government spending and a series of irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy that the country couldn’t afford.<\/p>\n

Bolten has sold reckless tax cuts as fiscal responsibility<\/a>, defended absurd budget tricks<\/a> as sensible governing, argued falsely that tax cuts can pay for themselves<\/a>, made demonstrably-false claims<\/a> about the budget deficit, and embraced misleading scare tactics<\/a> to promote privatization of Social Security. Bolten also made quite an impression with a memo<\/a> last year arguing that the administration could ignore legal restrictions and spend as much as it pleases on fake news segments and pundit payola.<\/p>\n

Only Bush would see Bolten as the kind of official in need of a promotion. Anyone hoping that today’s staff shake-up might represent a change in direction for the Bush White House is likely to be disappointed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To follow up on my earlier post on [tag]Andy Card[\/tag]’s [tag]resignation[\/tag], I think it’s also worth mentioning that his successor, former OMB Director [tag]Joshua Bolten[\/tag], is getting a pretty big promotion despite not having much success on the job. The president said this morning: “With me today is Joshua Bolten, who will be the new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}