The Memory Hole

Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," was a rewrite man. His job was to destroy documents that could undermine the government's pretense of infallibility, and replace them with altered versions.

Lately, Winston Smith has gone to Washington. I'm sure that lots of history is being falsified as you read this — there are several three-letter agencies I don't trust at all — but two cases involving the federal budget caught my eye.

First is the "Chicago line." Shortly after Sept. 11, George W. Bush told his budget director that the only valid reasons to break his pledge not to run budget deficits would be if the country experienced recession, war or national emergency. "Lucky me," he said. "I hit the trifecta."

When I first reported this remark, angry readers accused me of inventing it. Mr. Bush, they said, is a decent man who would never imply that the nation's woes had taken him off the hook, let alone make a joke out of it.

Soon afterward, the trifecta story became part of Mr. Bush's standard stump speech. It always gets a roar of appreciative laughter from Republican audiences.

So what's the Chicago line? In his speeches, Mr. Bush claims to have laid out the criteria for running a deficit when visiting Chicago during the 2000 campaign. But there's no evidence that he said anything of the sort during the campaign, in Chicago or anywhere else; certainly none of the reporters who were with him can remember it. (The New Republic, which has tracked the claim, titled one of its pieces "Stop him before he lies again.") In fact, during the campaign his budget promises were unqualified, for good reason. If he had conceded that future surpluses were not guaranteed, voters might have wondered whether it was wise to lock in a 10-year tax cut.

About that 10-year tax cut: It basically takes place in two phases. Phase I, which has mainly happened already, is a smallish tax cut for the middle class. Phase II, which won't be completed until 2010, is a considerably larger cut that goes mostly to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers.