First, thank you to Bob and Tim for allowing me to join and contribute to their always-prescient blog. Bob oversells me: I hope to at least keep up with he and Tim in the pace of their insights!
So my first contribution as an adjunct blogger might turn out to be a controversial one. I have now come across three different people pointing to similarities between the campaign to sell the stimulus package working its way through Congress, and the campaign to sell the Iraq war in 2002-03. Agnosticism marks my position here, but I should point out that this seems to have little to do with ideology. One of these three people is what you might call a traditional liberal who generally favors the stimulus package. Another is Jesse Walker at Reason, who is the most explicit about the parallels.
Irrespective of the merits or demerits of the stimulus, it's an interesting dilemma: the importance of deliberative debate in a democracy versus the need for haste in addressing an ever-deteriorating economy. As far as I can tell, the Iraq-stimulus parallels pertain more to the tone of the dialogue rather than the original economic and financial premises of the stimulus.
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