PORK!! A page 1 story in The Washington Post today passes on the president's harsh criticisms of Congress's Iraq supplemental bills, devoting many paragraphs to Bush's indignant recitation of several porky domestic spending provisions in the packages. Could it have hurt the authors to at least briefly mention that every emergency Iraq supplemental devised and passed by Republican Congresses in the last several years -- and happily signed by the president -- has included such provisions?
The supplemental bill passed in 2005 included "pork efforts such as redirecting existing funds to study preservation of Rio Grande River silvery minnows, providing debt service on a firefighting training academy in Elko, Nev., and allowing oil and gas exploration along Mississippi's Gulf Islands National Seashore." The one passed a year later included funds for "the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Arrowhead Center at New Mexico State University, and the Rhode Island School of Design" (see more here).
As I've indicated before, I'm a bit more cavalier than most about the use of pork to grease the legislative wheels. I think it's obvious that the much more procedurally troublesome aspect of the way this war has been funded is the administration's very insistence on the accounting shenanigan of emergency supplementals, which have no justification other than to serve as a means of blurring the cost of (and complicating debate over) the war. But regardless of what one thinks of Republicans' criticisms of the pork included in the new bill, newspapers ought to be including the very recent history of such measures in their accounts for context.
--Sam Rosenfeld
