The read

From my mid-week column in the Athens Banner-Herald ...

Cowsert also has been playing his own sort of mental gymnastics with the realities of budgetary help. At one of the numerous tea parties earlier this year, he boasted that the state government managed to balance its budget and that they "did not borrow a dime to do (it)."

It's the typical "we pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps" meme that gets trotted out at those types of functions.

Of course, it's not true at all, and when a reporter called Cowsert out for fudging the facts since the federal government provided Georgia with ample supplemental funding, he merely shrugged it off. If they hadn't gotten the money from Washington, Cowsert said, they'd just have rolled up their sleeves and cut a billion more from the budget.

That type of machismo is nothing short of blatant intellectual dishonesty.