At this point in his dismal tenure, virtually any statement emanating from President Bush is dripping with irony. Today's speech marking the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is no exception.
For even as the President lambasted Congressional Democrats about the need for "clean" Iraq war funding bill "without strings" attached, it is the Bush White House which continues to rely on such hidden provisos in its political purge of prosecutors and manipulation of the federal budget.
In his brief statement today, the President fired a shot across the bow of House Democrats seeking to tie Iraq performance benchmarks and a withdrawal timeline to future funding for the war:

"Members of Congress are now considering an emergency war spending bill. They have a responsibility to ensure that this bill provides the funds and the flexibility that our troops need to accomplish their mission. They have a responsibility to pass a clean bill that does not use funding for our troops as leverage to get special interest spending for their districts. And they have a responsibility to get this bill to my desk without strings and without delay."

When it comes to "clean" spending bills, however, it is President Bush and his Republican Party who are the poster children for budgetary abuse and special interest spending. On January 3, 2007, the President called on Congress to cut by half the number and cost of so-called "earmarks," pet project funding often quietly inserted into bills at the 11th hour. On the 25th, Rob Portman of the Office of Management and Budget (and formerly a GOP Congressman from Ohio), issued a memo called for the creation of a public database of all earmarks from FY 2005 to shine light on the clandestine pork.
As it turns out, the OMB earmark database released on March 13th provides a lot of heat, but not much light. That's because OMB did not publish data linking specific projects to individual Congressman. Instead, the earmark database shows only the aggregate number of projects and dollars by department, which totaled over 10,700 earmarks and $10.7 billion in FY 2005. The Bush White House, as GOP water carrier Robert Novak detailed today, decided to protect Republicans in Congress instead:

But just as OMB was preparing to put out the information, it sent word to Capitol Hill that -- over the agency's protests -- the data were being kept under wraps by the White House to appease the appropriators. With Congress in the midst of the budget process, President Bush's team did not want to stir up the Hill.
All that was released last Monday was a compilation of 2005 earmarks, with few details. Portman publicly called it "an important first step towards providing greater transparency." In private, however, he said last week: "My hands are tied." Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), scourge of earmarks, told me: "I think the American people should be very disappointed."

Which brings us to irony #2. Even as President Bush insisted on "no strings" attached to the new Iraq funding bill, a hidden codicil attached to the Patriot Act revision of 2005 is at the center of the exploding scandal over the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys. As Dahlia Lithwick described in Slate ("Specter Detector"), it was Brett Tolman of the Bush DOJ who colluded with Arlen Specter's chief-of-staff and former Clarence Thomas clerk Michael O'Neill to sneak the new prosecutors appointments provision into the Patriot Act. As Lithwick notes:

"The new language removed both judicial and congressional oversight of the interim U.S. attorneys, letting DOJ anoint them indefinitely. This served three important goals: consolidating presidential power, diminishing oversight, and ensuring that "interim" prosecutors had permanent jobs."

It's no wonder that Joe Conason referred to this rider linked to the Patriot Act, legislation which the political environment assured would pass, as "Alberto Gonzales' coup d'etat."
So as President Bush uses this fourth anniversary of his Iraq war to string along the American people, it is worth remembering who is really unclean.