If you look at Time magazine this morning, or the Washington Post editorial page, or the Politico, you’ll see the representatives, elected and otherwise, of the Republican party telling the same story:
Ol’ Obama rode into office promising to change the way politics works, and here he is engaging in a coordinated–coordinated!–attack on Rush Limbaugh and the Republican party, implying Mr. Oxycontin is the party’s leader, and all in an attempt to distract the public from the Democrat party’s ginormous spending.
I’ve never heard a bigger load of hooey in my life. You can agree or disagree with the actions Obama’s taking–I happen to agree with most and disagree with some–but it’s a lie to say that anybody’s trying to duck discussion of it. Hell, it’s all over news. Obama’s made a couple of high profile speeches this week in support of his spending bill, and just got done with an extremely public debate over the stimulus package. If that’s changing the subject, I don’t know what isn’t.
One consistently repeated nugget of…whatever in this little tale the Republic party is telling is that the Democrats have authorized more spending already than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and Katrina combined. I’m not sure how they figure the $787bn stimulus bill exceeds the $872bn cost of the wars so far–maybe they’re including the $350bn TARP monies originally requested by Bush–but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exceed the conservative $2.4bn final bill estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.
Democrats–and especially Obama–have argued all along that we weren’t spending enough in Afghanistan, and if I were the Republic party, I wouldn’t bring up the contractor give-away that was Katrina at all. Ever. You’d think Bobby Jindal would’ve taught them that already.
The Republicans are not completely without valid, issue-based rejoinders right now; it’s too bad they’re not using any of them. It’s a great question about whether we should be pouring more money into the big three, a collection of companies so thoroughly and dependably incompetent they make AIG look like a bunch of Geniuses. With Lindsay Graham pointing out that re-ownership of failing banks may be necessary, the Republicans could totally own that issue, and ask why the government is giving out metric assloads of taxpayer money to financial institutions and getting next to nothing in return. Some party is going to have to sack up and advocate wiping out the shareholders in these failed companies and selling off whatever good assets they have left. If you can’t lose money by investing in a company that’s a failure, then America is not a market economy. It’s too bad we don’t have an opposition party ready to do any of that.
This is the part of the post where I make some pithy and gratuitously offensive non sequitor like “Also, fuck Rush Limbaugh,” but I just got a picture of that in my head and my heart’s not in in it any more. Sorry.
