We know the libertarians at the Cato Institute think Bush spends too much taxpayer money -- they think nearly every politician spends too much taxpayer money. But here's a senior fellow at Cato saying that if the Bush administration lied about the Medicare bill, why should we believe Bush rather than Richard Clarke?

...While Clarke was making his case before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, was telling the House Ways and Means Committee that he shared estimates of the burgeoning cost of the proposed Medicare drug bill with administration officials last summer. Yet former Medicare administrator Thomas Scully threatened to fire Foster if the latter released the estimates to Congress.

"We can't let that get out," Foster said Scully told him....

Once the revised number emerged, Thompson said nothing: "I did not tell them because it was not my responsibility." Apparently his only responsibility was winning votes by hoodwinking the people's elected representatives. The president has said nothing about this scandal so far.

Equally serious is the weapons of mass destruction fiasco. The president, vice president, secretary of state and secretary of defense painted a veritable arsenal of horrors. Nuclear weapons programs, anthrax, biotoxins, chemical weapons, nerve agents, smallpox, biological weapons trailers, unmanned aerial vehicles, long-range ballistic missiles and more were being developed and deployed for use against America....

And administration officials had reason to know, or at least suspect, that many of them were false....

At no point has the president or his advisers accepted responsibility. At worst, they appear to be conscious liars. At best they seem deceitful and manipulative.

That doesn't mean that Clarke is right and the administration is wrong. But it does mean people are understandably suspicious of administration excuses....

This Catoite isn't angry because the Bushies are spenders. He's angry because they're liars. If Bush is losing the Cato crowd...

(Thanks to Phil for the link.)