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But Angle, as she often does, when confronted with previous positions from abolishing the Education Department to phasing out Social Security and Medicare, just plows ahead as if her reinvention project is perfectly believable. If she says she never said it, maybe she never did — unless, as has so often happens but could not Thursday, someone plays Warren Wolf and goes to the videotape.

There really is a simple way to address this. Say this:

"I believe that education in this country was better before we had a Department of Education, for many reasons, one of which is localized control. Social Security is in danger of going bankrupt at some point and we have to address it, there's no way around it. Don't misunderstand this to mean that the day I enter office I'm going to simply cut off millions of people, there's no way I could endorse such a plan, and it's insulting that people have suggested that. All I've said is we have to have this discussion on what to do so our children and grandchildren have stability. It doesn't take a genius to know that Social Security is unsustainable.

Re: the Education Department

In inflation adjusted dollars, we’ve spent over a *trillion* dollars on the Education Department since it was founded (the data’s all available at a gov’t web-site - I counted it up).

And since the Education Department was founded, the rankings of the US internationally in math and reading have only gone down.

The pertinent question, then, is whether that trillion dollars would have been better spent locally, since it’s clear it wasn’t well spent by funneling it through an enormous federal bureaucracy.

The first thing someone like Angle needs to say is “I’m all for education - that’s why I’m against the bureaucratic rat-hole that is the “Education Department”. Could your school district have made good use of it’s share of that trillion - that thousand billion - dollars?