"Rose Garden rubbish." Up to now that richly evocative phrase has been used exclusively to describe what political lexicographer William Safire calls the "supposedly ad-lib remarks made by the President on minor occasions." But that was before George Bush and a phalanx of congressional leaders strolled into the Rose Garden last Friday morning to announce that they had hammered out the 1990 budget concordat. Now, in updated fashion, Rose Garden rubbish can also be defined as "the unveiling of a cynical, bipartisan arrangement to avoid difficult decisions on the deficit through the use of artful arithmetic, Panglossian projections and other green-eyeshade...
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