An excellent, excellent article from Sunday’s New York Times Magazine explains something: There is no Social Security crisis. I learned so much from this piece – great information about the history of Social Security and the debates surrounding it. Bottom line: the Bush people are manufacturing a crisis in order to build support for a radical ideological goal. Sound familiar? (*koff* Iraq *koff*)

In this case, their goal is to privatize Social Security. If they want a debate on whether privatizing Social Security is a good thing, fine — let’s have that debate. But let it be an honest debate. Bush likes to say that he trusts the people, but if he trusted the people, he’d tell them straight out what he wanted to do, and then he’d let them decide. By inventing a crisis, he’s showing that he really doesn’t have faith in his own beliefs, or that he doesn’t think most people would agree with private accounts if they knew the truth. He hopes that people are uninformed enough to accept his lies.

So he thinks people are dumb enough to accept his lies, but smart enough to invest their own Social Security money wisely? I don’t get it.

It saddens me how much truth and logic has gone out the window these last few years. I’m so sick of it. That’s the worst thing about this administration — not the policies (though they do suck), but the lies used to advance them.

Joshua Micah Marshall has some good stuff as well.