ECONOMY WARRANTS ATTENTION IT'S GETTING FROM BUSH

Both axes of the Bush-Cheney administration have been declaiming on the deplorable state of the U.S. economy. With Alan Greenspan's sky-high real interest rates, the Nasdaq down 50 percent this year, the Dow in the dumper to a lesser extent, consumer confidence plunging and one stat after another signaling alarm, there is ample cause for concern.

No good deed goes unpunished. For accurately summarizing the perilous state of the economy, Bush and Cheney have been savaged by Democrats and their media echo chamber, especially by the increasingly irrelevant Dan Rather of the once-vaunted Columbia Broadcasting System. Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling and a host of other high-ranking Democrats dumped all over the president-elect and vice president-elect, for the alleged sin of "talking down the economy," creating a "self-fulfilling prophecy of recession" etc.

All this was made still more fascinating the following true developments from the week just passed:

At a high-level budget briefing in a Midwestern state, convened by an incoming Democratic governor this week, the tale told by all the budgetary and economic experts was identical to the Bush-Cheney version. The stock market plunge has been "devastating" to consumer confidence, with far-ranging consequences for budgetary planners concerning revenue projections. Result: The state in question, which shall remain nameless, will fail to achieve revenue forecasts for the first time in seven years. The decline in consumer confidence was stressed as most worrisome, precisely as Bush and Cheney have been saying. The farm economy on which this Midwestern state depends so heavily can fairly be described as in desperate straits, with commodity prices in the dumper for the third straight year. And on, depressingly on, for four hours or so.

So much so, said these Democratic budgetary planners, that joking was heard that, "We're going to have to start thinking, talking and acting like Republicans on the budget!"

So much for the media-Democratic spin.

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Search for words useful for all times, the ancient monarch was told by his sages, and the answer is: "This too shall pass."

From The Wall Street Journal's Christmas editorial, "In Hoc Anno Domini," published annually since 1949:

"Then, of a sudden, there was a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.

"And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent his Gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.

"So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that men would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.

"... And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled with the yoke of bondage."

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.