Who's Wasting Whose Time Here? At a GOP rally at the White House yesterday, President Bush took the opportunity to have another tantrum, again threatening to veto a congressional appropriations proposal, the latest in a series of nearly a dozen such veto threats: Congress is not getting its work done... We're near the end of the year, and there really isn't much to show for it... I believe [Congress] is wasting valuable time. Or could it be that Congress, being forced to negotiate with itself because Bush refuses to negotiate, is having its time wasted? Bush is belatedly seeking to burnish his credentials as a fiscal conservative despite six years of deficit-spending and debt accumulation. His credentials as a compassionate conservative are a casualty of his spending policy. Apparently, there are some things Bush hates more than he loves war spending -- he is requesting $200 billion more war spending over the next year -- and that's spending an additional $9 billion over the next year on such things as:

• veterans health care
• cancer research
• early childhood education
• helping the poor heat their homes this winter

[Query: would he consider it compassionate support for our over-extended bogged-down troops in Iraq to remove them from harm's way, instead of continuing to tether them to terrority strewn with IEDs and subject to suicide bombers?]