But it doesn't smell like success

Time to tout the successes, downplay the failures and whip up support for more success-generating tax cuts.

President George W. Bush and his top lieutenants fanned out around the United States on Friday to sell the administration's plan for tax cuts and free trade as necessary for promoting growth.

Bush has highlighted his economic record in the face of growing public discontent over the Iraq war, frustration over record-high gasoline prices and anger over the administration's slow response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

During the administration's propaganda tour, they'll say that 108,000 jobs were created in December. They won't say that total is barely more than half of the 205,000 jobs economists expected to be created.

They'll say that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit has gone into effect and is saving seniors money. They won't say what a cluster fuck their "benefit" created, or that legislation passed on December 21 by the slim margin of Dick Cheney's tiebreaking vote "increases the fees charged to Medicaid recipients, lets states cut Medicaid benefits, reduces enforcement funds for child support, and more."

They won't say that 45.8 million people in this country have no health insurance.

They won't say that:

Salaries are still below where they were at the start of the recovery in November 2001. That, while productivity -- the growth of the economic pie -- is up by almost 15 percent. Meaning we're working harder, producing more, for the same money as five years ago.

Median household income has now fallen for five years in a row. It was 4 percent, or $2,000, lower in 2004 than it was in 1999.

They won't say that 5 million more Americans are living in poverty today than four years ago, that 37 million people in this country are living in poverty, or that the number of people in this country who live in poverty hasn't fallen since Bush took office.

And while they're telling us with straight faces how great things are and that their current policies are working, they certainly won't say that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that "our budget position will substantially worsen in the coming years unless major deficit-reducing actions are taken."

"So long as health-care costs continue to grow faster than the economy as a whole, they will exert budget pressures that seem increasingly likely to make current fiscal policy unsustainable," he added.

Even their successes are failures.