Carrying Journalistic Coals to Newcastle

Pity poor Paul Krugman. For the umpteenth time he has written a blog posting to point out the utter hypocrisy of the Republican party and the unwillingness of the press to report the facts. It is sorrowful to see such a heroic struggle for jounalistic justice in the face of utter hypocrisy and indifference...

I see that the Washington Post editorial board is shocked, shocked to discover that the incoming Republicans aren’t serious about deficit reduction. Who could have suspected?

I was going to be snarky all the way here, but actually let’s be serious: the gullibility of much of the media establishment on all this amounts to journalistic malpractice..

Republicans have, after all, been the party of fiscal irresponsibility since 1980; the GW Bush administration confirmed, if anyone was in doubt, that unfunded tax cuts are now in the party’s DNA.

Then along comes a Democratic president who presides over all of two years of deficits in the immediate aftermath of a severe financial crisis – which is a time when you’re actually supposed to run deficits. Republicans begin inveighing against the evils of red ink – and, incredibly, get taken at face value.

And even if you didn’t know the history, if you actually paid attention to what leading Republicans were saying, their lack of seriousness was totally obvious. You had the Ryan plan, which claimed to reduce the deficit but, if you actually looked into it at all, relied completely on magic asterisks; you had the declarations by top Republicans that deficits are terrible but there’s no need to offset the cost of tax cuts.

The idea that these people were allowed to pose as deficit hawks is stunning.

Oh, and for those claiming that Republicans have always said that spending, not deficits is what matters: first of all, this is very much revisionist history; you can’t denounce the federal debt, then claim that you never cared about the revenue side of things. Beyond that, the deficit scare tactics lately have been all about solvency, not mere crowding out; repent, they said, or you’ll turn into Greeeeeece. That’s a scare story about solvency, for which the deficit, not spending, is what matters.

I guess the message needs to broadcast and rebroadcast to catch the young naifs who are just stumbling on the political scene and don't understand the historical record and the depths of hypocrisy in the Republican railing against the debt and deficits. But it is a Sisyphean task to continually remind the world of a fact as plain as the nose on your face, a Pinocchio nose that grows longer with each repeated sanctimonious claim by the Republicans that they are the party of fiscal prudence.

Here is just the latest example of Republican hypocrisy:

Repealing health-care reform would cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- and Eric Cantor knows it

By Ezra Klein

House Republicans are in a pickle: One of their new rules says that new legislation must be paid for. But the health-care bill reduces the federal deficit by more than $100 billion over the next 10 years. Luckily, they've figured out an answer to their problem: They've decided to simply exempt the repeal bill from the rules. That means they're beginning the 112th Congress by lifting their own rules in order to take a vote that will increase the deficit. Change we can believe in, and all that.

Republicans are aware that this looks, well, horrible. So they're trying to explain why their decision to lift the rule requiring fiscal responsibility is actually fiscally responsible. Majority Leader Eric Cantor got asked about this, and he returned the reporter's serve with a volley of nonsense. "About the budget implications, I think most people understand that the CBO did the job it was asked to do by the then-Democrat majority, and it was really comparing apples to oranges,” Cantor said. “It talked about 10 years' worth of tax hikes and six years' worth of benefits. Everyone knows beyond the 10-year window, this bill has the potential to bankrupt this federal government as well as the states."

That's all well and good -- but it's not true. Take Cantor's core point: The health-care reform bill includes "10 years' worth of tax hikes and six years' worth of benefits." There's nothing philosophical about this statement. It can be checked with a simple look at the spending tables the Congressional Budget Office published in their analysis of the bill. And when you look at those tables, Cantor's statement falls apart.

Go read the whole article to get the graph, the links, and additional text.

The Republican party is the party of the Hoover Great Depression and the Bush Great Recession. They are the party of the McCarthy witch hunts. They are the party of the impeached Nixon who tried to subvert the rule of law while doing a Christine O'Donnell "I am not a crook!" speech. They are the party of Reagan subverting the Constitution by secreting breaking the law to sell missiles to Iran in order to fund the illegal Nicaraguan Contra war. They are the party of bait-and-switch claiming a need to invade Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction which morphed into "bringing democracy to the Middle East" but in fact only brought chaos and death to the poor Iraqis. This is the party of hypocrisy. And the tragedy is that Americans keep handing the keys of the kingdom back to these jackals.