Am I obsessed with President Bush? Almost certainly. What I find most consistently startling is that the lies told by his administration are so huge and so spectacular, that most people don't even recognize them, simply because congnitive dissonance prevents them from believing that someone they trusted enough to vote for could act the way the President does.

Beyond Iraq, the risk is that the rest of the world won't believe anything the U.S. government says. Bush explained to Russert that he invaded Iraq in part because "when the United States says there will be serious consequences" and those consequences don't follow, "people look at us and say, 'They don't mean what they say.' " True enough. But meaning what you say won't get other nations to join you in policing the world, if what you think and say bears no relationship to reality.

The punch line is that Bush accomplished exactly what he set out to do in this interview: He showed you how his mind works. Republicans used to observe derisively that Clinton had a difficult relationship with the truth. Bush has a difficult relationship with the truth, too. It's just a different—and perhaps more grave—kind of difficulty.

These documents are drawn from a collection of 19,000 files of Paul H. O'Neill, the U.S. Treasury Secretary for the first two years of the Presidency of George W. Bush. Like all Treasury Secretaries, O'Neill was the top domestic appointment of the President and also a principal of the National Security Council. The files, which range from memoranda to the President to handwritten notes to "sensitive" internal reports, cover a sweeping array of foreign and domestic issues. They also display the attending political and personal matters that often determine policy. They were collected as part of a Treasury Department archiving process in which every item that crossed O'Neill's desk, from every department in government, was copied into a TIF, or image, file. Documents cited in the "The Price of Loyalty" are presented with explanations of context and little comment. They speak, as does all irrefutable evidence, for themselves. More files of compelling public interest will be released in the coming days and weeks.

The posting of these files is meant to encourage more productive, fact-based public dialogues. Those who wish to add documents to The Bush Files, can contact Ron Suskind through this site or send submissions to his private post office box.

The wheels are coming off Bush’s presidency, just like they did for his father a decade ago. After Desert Storm, Daddy Bush’s sky-high approval ratings seemed certain to ensure his re-election. But that didn’t happen because an ex-Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton wound up booting him out of the White House. Like a cocaine cowboy, partying hard until his stash is gone, George W. Bush now faces a horrific crash as intelligence failures, a record-deficit budget, a jobless economy and two wars abroad combine to pull him down....

Even Bush’s own conservative base is starting to tremble at the path down which their president is leading them. While they are happy to see Bush’s budget slash spending on the Environmental Protection Agency and low-income housing assistance, they are stunned at the massive increase in military spending, which includes billions for new submarines, fleets of jet fighters, and the Star Wars missile defense system. Conservatives have long railed against liberals for what they call “throwing money” at the nation’s problems. But liberals can’t hold a candle to President Bush when it comes to runaway spending, and he obviously believes throwing money at the military will solve our security problems.

THE BUSH administration's 2005 budget is a masterpiece of disingenuous blame-shifting, dishonest budgeting and irresponsible governing. The administration mildly terms the $521 billion deficit forecast this year "a legitimate subject of concern," but asserts that it has the problem well in hand: The deficit, it assures the country, will be cut in half by 2009. This isn't credible -- and even if it were, it wouldn't be an adequate answer to a problem far more serious than this administration acknowledges.

Having presided over record deficits, the administration now wants to claim credit if it manages to cut the bloated number in half. Imagine someone who's been piling on extra pounds at an alarming rate. Trimming his annual weight gain from 30 pounds this year to 15 pounds five years from now still leaves him fat -- and getting fatter. The goal shouldn't be to cut the deficit in half; it should be to remedy the gap between what the government is spending and what it is taking in. To keep running up these deficits is to stick future generations with a tab they won't be able to afford.

The administration presents itself as blameless victim. "Today's budget deficits are the unavoidable product of the revenue erosion from the stock market collapse that began in early 2000, an economy recovering from recession, and a nation confronting serious national security threats," its budget states. "Had there not been one dime of tax relief under President Bush, we would have still run substantial budget deficits."

Yes, but what this omits is the degree to which the administration's tax cuts -- many dimes' worth, as it happens -- contributed to the problem. Of this year's $521 billion deficit, the tax cuts account for $272 billion. In 2009, when the administration projects that it will have cut the deficit to $239 billion, the tax cuts (assuming the administration wins the extension it demanded again yesterday) will cost $183 billion -- in other words, the lion's share of the projected shortfall.

But this low-ball estimate is a mirage. Like the 2005 budget, it doesn't take into account continuing costs in Iraq and Afghanistan. It fails to address the acknowledged problem of the alternative minimum tax, which was aimed at the wealthy but is sweeping in growing numbers of ordinary taxpayers. It doesn't fully fund the administration's long-term defense spending plans. A more accurate picture of the likely deficit in 2009 -- even assuming the administration manages to keep to its stated spending limits -- would put it more than $150 billion higher. And, of course, the surplus in government retirement accounts masks the true size of the shortfall: $501 billion in 2009, even under the administration's fuzzy math.