James on the Statistics thread: Hendrik Hertzberg rules. This article, from The New Yorker about a month ago, demonstrates why. It was immediately seized upon by anti-Bush people and has shown up several places since, so you might have read it already. Apropos the statistics thing is this quote:

"'These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans,' Bush said in Chicago. 'Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money.' The first of these claims, as the Financial Times editorialized the day after the speech, is 'obviously bogus.' The second is true, but only in the sense that it is also true that if Bill Gates happened to drop by a homeless shelter where a couple of nuns were serving soup to sixty down-and-outers dressed in rags, the average person in the room would have a net worth of a billion dollars. Average, yes; typical, no. A typical taxpayer—one right smack in the middle of the income range—will get a couple of hundred dollars. And a worker in the bottom twenty per cent will get next to nothing—at most, a dime or a quarter a week."

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, yada yada yada. Politically, the smartest thing for Bush to do in the face of such damning evidence is the thing that he's doing: ignore it. It's similar to what Nixon advised Reagan to do in the Iran-Contra scandal: say nothing. People are stupid. If you act like you know what you're doing, people will assume you do. The entirety of mainstream society has effectively forgotten that George W. Bush was not elected to the Presidency. And now the Republicans control all aspects of the federal government. Perhaps it's not a mistake of categorization that The Prince is as popular as the B&N top-selling political books list says it is.