…is that they could have been talking like this (i.e., telling the truth) all the time.

… All of which points to the broader problem with the numbers that Mr. Bush cites to refute suggestions he is a big spender. The slice of the federal budget identified by the president as an example of restrained growth amounts to only about one-sixth of overall federal spending. Yet that is precisely where he wants to inflict additional cuts in the years to come. Mr. Bush proposes to increase defense spending by 7.1 percent next year -- and that doesn't include any additional money for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps $50 billion more. He wants to increase spending on homeland security by an additional 9.7 percent. That would leave other spending effectively frozen -- or cut, once inflation is taken into account.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has presided over a huge -- and bigger than first advertised -- increase in mandatory spending with the addition of a prescription drug benefit for Medicare now estimated to cost $534 billion in its first decade. Having put that in place, he now shows little appetite for curbing the growth of entitlement programs, which account for a far bigger share of the federal budget. Indeed, his proposal to create private accounts for Social Security, restated in the budget just released, would make the cost of the prescription drug bill look trivial. Mr. Bush argued on Sunday that his record has been one of fiscal restraint. The facts -- once checked -- show otherwise.