Demagogue

Remember the outrage when it was reported (incorrectly) that a UN official had singled out the U.S. as being too stingy after the tsunami? How everyone from Colin Powell to the Wall Street Journal huffed that the United States was the most generous country on Earth? How, when Bush was shamed into increasing his pledge of aid by a couple of orders of magnitude, we were told that he'd planned all along to do so?

Well, it looks as if the administration's generous aid pledge may go the same way as Bush's pledge of money to New York after 9/11, his rousing State of the Union call for more funding to stop AIDS in Africa, and the promise of funding for No Child Left Behind. At least, that's what House Republicans would like.