Bullet the blue sky

It's well known that U2's Vertigo opens with some flawed counting: Unos, dos, tres, catorce [1,2,3,14]. But Bono's minor innumeracy is nothing compared to the uses to which his name is being put to spin for Dubya's aid program in Africa. Here is Wednesday's Wall Street Journal second editorial (subs, req'd):

Who's Stingy?
Ask Bono about America's generosity.

it's so much easier [than taking on farmers] to demand that American taxpayers pony up ever more money. But as even the likes of rockers Bono and Bob Geldof have acknowledged, the U.S. has hardly been stingy. Mr. Geldof told Time magazine last month, "Actually, today I had to defend the Bush Administration in France again. They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he has actually done more than any American president for Africa. But it's empirically so."

Last year U.S. bilateral aid to Africa was $3.2 billion compared with $1.1 billion in the final year of the Clinton Administration ... Last month Mr. Bush committed another $674 million in humanitarian aid to the region, which exceeds the entire U.S. budget for sub-Saharan aid in 1997. Amid such facts, it takes nerve for such former Clinton officials as Susan Rice to lecture Americans as ungenerous, as they've been doing for weeks now on op-ed pages

... "I think he's done an incredible job, his Administration, on AIDS. And 250,000 Africans are on anti-viral drugs. They literally owe their lives to America," Bono said on NBC's "Meet the Press" a week ago Sunday.

This sequence shows the careful calculation that goes into being a spinner. The editorial leads by promising a refutation straight from Bono's mouth of claims that Dubya is being stingy, but the only meat is a compliment from Bono about one specific program. They know that they can't get away with what the State Department did last week, which was to splice two separate Bono quotes together -- one commenting on Bush's claim to have trebled aid to Africa, and the above quote on AIDS, to make it seem as if he approved of the whole Dubya package.

And in WSJ land, the doctrine of pre-emption means that you attack anyone who might come forward with awkward facts, and so it is with Susan Rice, who has meticulously documented how Bush's claims about having doubled or trebled aid to Africa are just wrong. The only aid components that have gone up by that magnitude: foreign military financing and food aid -- the latter just a convenient way to dump US food surpluses. Even that "new" money that Dubya announced in the pre-G8 meeting with Blair was just money that was already there, just not assigned a specific purpose yet.

And just as they did a few weeks ago, the clincher on Dubya's generosity:

let's never forget the enormous contribution that U.S. military spending at 4% of GDP makes to general peace and prosperity.

Things were better when Bono's main route to the WSJ was via bad language.