Editorials

President Bush came to Alabama on Thursday to lend a hand to Bob Riley's re-election campaign. (Talk about overkill on behalf of a governor who's on a big-time roll heading into the Nov. 7 election.)

While visiting our fine state, the president attempted the equivalent of hollering “Roll Tide” in Bryant-Denny or “War Eagle” in Jordan-Hare.

“Five years after 9/11, the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, Democrats offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing,” the president said in Birmingham. “The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.”

That's preaching to the converted. Let's hear you trot out that full-frontal canard on your loyal opposition in, say, Massachusetts or some other deep blue spot on the U.S. map, Mr. President.

Bush and his speechwriters ought to be ashamed to throw that rhetoric around in Alabama, where natives of this state are paying an inordinate share of the burden for his mistakes in Iraq, both in loss of life and financially.

Here's one way to think about it: The White House, according to congressional testimony, never expected the Iraq occupation to last past 2003. Staffers low-balled the occupation costs to U.S. taxpayers; one White House economist lost his job for predicting the country would spend hundreds of billions of dollars. He was right and then some; the costs are at $300 billion and rising. The nation spends $2 billion a week in Iraq, where the president says we are spreading democracy.

What the nation spends every 10 weeks in Iraq is equal to Alabama's fiscal 2007 budget, which begins Sunday. The $9 billion in U.S. taxpayer money lost in Iraq because of poor accounting procedures almost equals what Alabama will spend on education for 2007.

With its unfair and pathetic state Constitution, Alabama could stand its own version of a democracy makeover. Just imagine what we could do with a fraction of these billions of dollars.