Since the early Reagan years, many influential conservatives have argued (usually, though not always, privately) that conservative ends -- tax cuts and increased defense spending, primarily -- more than justified the fundamentally dishonest budgetary means often required to secure their enactment. (Note: It's no accident that outlays and receipts were eventually brought into balance during the Clinton era; with neither side consistently demagoguing the numbers, pols in both parties had the cover they needed to make the handful of moderately difficult policy choices that were required to get the budget process under control.) The interesting question today, in light of what we now know was the Bush administration's deeply cynical decision last year to employ the same tactic against its fellow Republicans by wildly underestimating the true cost of its Medicare drug bill, is whether the GOP will start to rethink its position on all this.

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I think it's just barely possible that they will. The last thing any sane Republican ever wants to face is an insatiable public desire for services on one side, and a president (of either party) willing to deceive the electorate about the real costs involved on the other. And that's precisely what George W. Bush has given them. So here's hoping the GOP finally comes to its senses and rejects the all-too-seductive politics of budgetary legerdemain before it's too late. If so, the political life they save may well be their own.