Crisis? What Crisis?
The Washington Post has a great article about the Chicken Little strategy employed in rallying support for their initiatives, looking back to the first term (with Iraq) and at their current cries of crisis:

Warning of the need for urgent action on his Social Security plan, Bush says the "crisis is now" for a system even the most pessimistic observers say will take in more in taxes than it pays out in benefits well into the next decade.

He calls the proliferation of medical liability lawsuits a "crisis in America" that can be fixed only by limiting a patient's right to sue for large damages. And Bush has repeatedly accused Senate Democrats of creating a "vacancy crisis" on the federal bench by refusing to confirm a small percentage of his judicial nominees.

This strategy helped Bush win support for the war in Iraq, tax cuts and education policies, as well as reclaim the White House. What is unclear is whether the same approach will work, given the battering to the administration's credibility over its Iraq claims and a new Democratic campaign accusing Bush of crying wolf.

The crisis of the moment, of course, is Social Security (certainly not the human devastation caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami):

The crisis, as Bush explains, is this: A decade or so from now the Social Security system will begin paying out more in benefits than it takes in payroll taxes because there will be higher percentage of older Americans than there is today. From that point, the system, if unchanged, will create a $3.7 trillion shortfall by 2075, or $10.4 trillion if calculated over eternity, that future generations will be forced to pay for. The crisis, in effect, is not fixing the problem before it spreads out of control, according to Bush.

But Bush's chief solution -- allowing younger workers to divert a portion of their 6.2 percent payroll tax into private investment accounts -- will do nothing to avert it unless it is accompanied by a reduction in future guaranteed benefits or other changes to the retirement program, according to many experts on Social Security.

With all this reliance on sky-is-falling rhetoric, if we really did have a crisis upon us (i.e., aggressive posturing by another nation that was about to fulminate into actual action), would we have any belief that the administration was telling us the truth? Ultimately, it would be a good thing to make some tweaks to Social Security to increase/improve its solvency, and the sooner we do it the safer it will become for future generations. But the truth of the matter is that the Republican's privatization scheme is truly an underhanded plan to get rid of the Social Security program and it will add even more monstrous debt onto this country. It hurts me to see that this is our nation's number one priority when well over 150,000 have died in southeast Asia and hundreds of thousands of others have been made homeless. We have an opportunity to spread the goodwill of the United States to populations that have been wary of our actions, yet all we can do is turn inward and wonder how much money we can save the rich.