Bush has a plan to fix the deficit.

To fix it in place for the rest of your tenure on Earth, that is. The administration is preparing to try to make permanent the already-passed temporary tax cuts for the rich, while gearing up to present yet another round of new ones for next year. However, the Washington Post, who inexplicably lit into Al Gore for criticizing Bush's fradulent case for war while their own reporters were revealing yet more brazenly fraudulent claims, says that the price tag for this misadventure is going to be entirely more expensive than any of us were told.

In a recent interview on CNBC's "Capital Report," Bremer said of rebuilding costs: "It's probably well above $50 billion, $60 billion, maybe $100 billion. It's a lot of money." President Bush and other administration officials have refused to provide projections, saying too much is unpredictable. That has angered lawmakers of both parties, who are writing the budget for the coming election year even as federal deficits approach $500 billion.

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Brookings Institution fellows Lael Brainard and Michael O'Hanlon said in a Financial Times article this month that military and reconstruction costs could be from $300 billion to $450 billion. Taxpayers for Common Sense said postwar costs over the next decade could range from $114 billion to $465 billion. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences projected 10-year expenses from $106 billion to $615 billion.

That's all over and above the $60 billion we have already thrown away on this. See, nobody would have signed on if Bush had stood up in the State of the Union address and said, "We want to spend roughly half a trillion dollars and an indeterminate number of American lives over the next decade to invade and occupy Iraq because we have evidence that the Ba'ath regime might one day reconstruct their illegal weapons programs, which we know for a fact were at least 95% destroyed during the inspections regime."

Instead of using the USS Lincoln to "prance around on a flight deck dressed up like a pilot" (as General Wesley Clark put it) and declare "mission accomplished," Bush should have been informing the American people and the world that all that had been accomplished was the first and simplest stage of a decade-long, half-trillion dollar undertaking. No, scratch that. He should have levelled with the public about that before the first bomb was dropped. But then he wouldn't have been able to get his war that gave him such a chubby.

The Democrats should be hammering this one home. Many (perhaps most) Americans will shrug at the fact that the entire weapons argument was a charade and that the links to al-Qaeda were demonstrably false from the get-go. As evidenced by all the post facto rationalizing and justifying from the right wing media, Americans expect politicians to lie to them.

Sticker shock, on the other hand, is quite a bit more visceral and immediate. And this may set the bar for all shocking stickers to come. Unfortunately but predictably, this administration's f*ck-you approach to diplomacy has placed us in a situation where most of the world would sooner spit in our passed hat than drop doubloons. What we are witnessing is either gross incompetence (gross incompetence = normal incompetence x 144) or a level of dishonesty to which not even Richard Nixon and Oliver North's secret love-child could ever hope to achieve.