As another week passed and another crisis came into focus, the Bush administration once again displayed its team colors as the Bad News Bears -- sans any hope of a cuddly Walter Matthau's reversal of fortunes. The informed and thus exceedingly nervous have taken to peeking at headlines with fingers crossed and a prayer muttered, imploring the gods for at least a sliver of good news for a change. But the gods and Bush II have been cruel, procreating instead one debacle after another. Handicappers predict more of the same.

The week that saw "postwar" American deaths in Iraq outnumber the official war's toll also greeted the worst fiscal news since Ronald the Gipper managed the economy with a Ouija board. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was the bad news bearer.

Assuming, said the CBO, that the Republican White House and Republican Congress have their way -- and why wouldn't they -- the federal government over the next 10 years will rack up $5.1 trillion in additional deficit spending. The projection conflicted a trifle bit with the White House's oxymoronic Office of Management and Budget, which only last month announced that deficits would max out next year at $475 billion and then shrink to an insignificant $62 billion by 2008. True enough, said CBO analysts, unless one factors in reality. When exercising this unBushian option a 2008 deficit in excess of $500 billion reveals itself, and things start getting bad after that. One Washington think tank has the deficit reaching $650 billion in 2013.

What's more, the CBO's doomsday projection is a rather conservative one, as doomsdays go, since it assumes rosy economic growth next fiscal year and regular rosiness thereafter. Most economists and their forecasts are not so sanguine.

But wait, Bush apologists are sure to cry. The CBO also assumes annual increases in discretionary spending at around 7 percent -- a deplorable, but reversible, trend. Get real. With George W. hopped up on Rummy's stash of Pentagon goof juice, discretionary spending is sure to continue heading everywhere but down, and everyone knows it.

All told, declared the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in 10 years the public debt will stand at $9.1 trillion. In 2013 we'll be forced to lay out $480 billion in interest alone. Just before W. took office -- and many mean that literally -- the CBO was projecting net interest payments of about $0 over the next 10 years. (2001 CBO estimate cited by the CBPP)

If that doesn't rock your world, this will. The Center went on to ask how the administration could possibly balance the budget by the final year of a second term, presupposing no tax increases as well as stable spending on Social Security, Medicare, defense and homeland security. The answer? All other government programs would have to be cut by a staggering 41 percent -- and we're talking spending reductions on matters that hit home for all Americans. In the Center's estimation, we're talking about draconian cuts in "education, veterans programs, law enforcement, transportation and infrastructure, environmental protection … biomedical research … unemployment compensation, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, child care, the school lunch and food stamp programs, and Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled poor."

The CBO's report and accompanying analyses have merely confirmed, of course, what other responsible observers have warned for 31 months: namely, this administration is creating an anaconda deficit that will crush government's every compassionate breath. In that sense, last week's revelatory headlines weren't news at all.

A fiscal nightmare, a foreign disaster, steady national decline and debasement -- so go events under modern conservatism's command. Full throttle we move from general chaos to conspicuous bedlam to blanket disorder marked by periods of intense upheaval. What crisis will the Bush administration sponsor tomorrow? Just cross your fingers and mutter a prayer that it's a small one.

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© Copyright 2003 P. M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.