At 07:57 AM 09/15/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote:
It's nearly impossible to be overly pessimistic... -- Bush asks for $20 billion, Congress doubles it to $40 billion (to be handed out in many cases to defense contractor buddies)
There are two separate things going on there - half of that money is for fixing New York; the other half is for getting revenge on Bush's Enemies List and letting the Military-Industrial Complex go kill people so that the Americans believe Bush Is Not A Wimp.
-- Bush asks for restrictions on some civil liberties, Congress proposes to repeal the Bill of Rights
Bush has been somewhat milder than the more rabid Congresscritters, but some of that's just the basic Bell Curve plus media behavior - with 500+ of them, you'd expect the more extreme to sound fairly extremist, and you'd expect the media to cover the extremists.