This Patrick Ruffini tweet made me laugh out loud:
The New Yorker:
O’Neill watched all this with anguish. Shortly before he was fired, he confronted Cheney about the Administration’s latest proposal to cut taxes by another six hundred and seventy-four billion dollars over ten years, pointing out that the country was “moving toward a fiscal crisis.” The Vice-President stopped him. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said. “We won the midterms. This is our due.” In fact, Reagan didn’t prove anything of the kind. Early in his first term, Congress was forced to adopt emergency tax increases and spending cuts to restrain the ballooning budget shortfall. Despite this remedial action, it wasn’t until the early nineties, when George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton raised taxes, that the nation’s finances were put in proper order, opening the way to the longest economic expansion on record.
And because I am +4, I’m not even going to go into the role that Gramm, of Gramm/Rudman/Hollings, played in the repeal of Glass-Steagal and the meltdown of last year that has led the way in getting us to where we are now.
But yeah. Republicans are all fiscal conservatives now.
General Winfield Stuck
Just the wingnut edition of endless war here at home.
Somebody has to pick the side the other didn’t
Otherwise, it would be fighting over pizza slices.
Nolo fun.
Bret
+4? I don’t get that. Someone want to explain it, please?
General Winfield Stuck
@Bret:
It represent number of alcoholic beverages consumed. Drinks.
asiangrrlMN
What the fuck is that? What the fuck? Do I need to be drunk to understand that tweet? What the fuck?
scudbucket
There is a kind of graceful beauty to the GOP, which is: When out of power, run on a platform of fiscal conservatism; when in power, run up the deficits with lies in place of justifications and blame it, next term, on the Dems. Rinse, repeat. The only problem is providing sufficiently dramatic myths to rally the troops to support profligate spending when the time comes. That and little things like looking yourself in the mirror, bankrupting the country, etc., no big deal.
El Cid
And, hey, the Savings & Loan situation proved that the Reaganites certainly knew what the fuck they were doing on banking! If only a prominent Senator deeply involved in that awesome improvement in our financial situation were available for comment on every fragging talk show imaginable to share his insights on how to improve our financial situation…
General Winfield Stuck
@scudbucket:
And I remember day one in 2007, when dems took to the House floor as the new majority. And wingnuts went straight to the bad bad tax and spend liberal canard with the first gavel whack. Never missed a beat nor cracked a smile. Like the past 6 to 14 years never happened.
Graceful beauty it was.
dan robinson
Republicans like to wave a St. Ronald flag all the time. Reagan was a disaster for this country.
On the other hand, the people who need to be convinced have accepted the divinity of St. Ronald axiomatically. My brother, whom I love dearly, thinks Reagan could almost walk on water. The day after Obama was elected, I was talking to him on the phone and he blurted out, “The man is a socialist!” I started to work it, asking him if he knew what socialism was all about, and he shut down. I gave up.
I was at the Reagan kick off in 1984, only because it was at De Anza College, where I had been taking classes. The event ended up costing the city of Cupertino and De Anza College a lot of money and they were not reimbursed by the campaign for things like extra security. It was Reagan and the Republicans in a nutshell: use the facilities and then let other people pay for them.
Bret
@General Winfield Stuck: That’s what I presumed. Thank you.
Alex S.
Always fights, always wars, always something to keep up the frenzy.
Mark
My girlfriend went to high school with Patrick Ruffini in CT. His family imports Italian sweaters to Greenwich. He was apparently a sexist douchebag nobody liked even back then.
Brian J
Let me ask guys like this a few questions: if they were to split the health care reform up into two separate parts–one based on expansion of coverage, the other based on cost control–would you vote the latter? (I am almost certain you wouldn’t vote for the former.) If not, why not? Do you think there are better ways to control costs that aren’t being talked about? Would you be willing to…shudder…work with the Democrats and the White House to hammer out an agreement that tried to incorporate those ideas?
On a different but related note, let me ask another question. I know you guys don’t like taxes. Believe it or not, we don’t, either. But we realize that they can be necessary in order to, you know, fund the government, even the parts that we don’t like. Are there any sort of tax increases that you’d vote for?
If the answer to both of those question is no, THEN SHUT THE FUCK UP! You guys are clearly incapable of governing responsibly and view having power like an exercise in describing an ideal world for a high school government class. You guys refuse to acknowledge that there are painful but possibly necessary steps that go against what you’d like to do. And when given the chance to make meaningful contributions in a process designed to prevent the government from going bankrupt and the world turning to shit, you sat on your hands or, worse yet, got in the way of those trying to make things better. Indeed, they have had many chances to participate in a modern Gramm-Rudman, otherwise known as the health care reform bills, which is, among other things, trying to prevent health care costs from destroying the country.
Fuck each and every one of you miserable sacks of shit.
Ailuridae
@scudbucket:
Yep.
Also, +4
Chris
And these are the people who are driving the debate, driving the coverage, and inspiring our political “leaders” to compromise time after time. Yippee.
At this point, I’m impressed that they’re not shitting on their own dinner plates.
Lab Partner
Putting aside the unadulterated absurdity of waiting on the same guys who drove us into this deficit ditch in the first place coming to our rescue, to have a new Gramm-Rudman you would need a new Rudman. The GOP is up to its amphibian gills in Gramms, but who the fuck is gonna credibly play the fiscally-responsible politically-centrist Rudman?
geg6
Lab Partner: Why President Olympia Snowe, who else? I’m sure President McCain, who is an expert on fiscal matters as we all learned during the s&l crisis and again last fall, can coach her.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Shorter Republicans: Reagan. Reagan Reagan, Reagan Reagan Reagan. Reagan and Reagan!
SFAW
Well, they call that “maintaining balance” or perhaps “bipartisanship”, so it’s all good.
Stop living in a cave! Everyone knows that President McCain is on the Sunday bobbleheads every week.
Well, that’s only because the “Nazi” meme hadn’t yet become popular. Hopefully your brother has updated his rant by now.
And Saint Ronnie DID walk on water, you DFH! It’s not like he ran up deficits or anything – which don’t matter anyway, unless the tax-and-spend LIEberals are “in power”. (The quotation marks around “in power” are there because, even though the
CommiesDemoncrats control both Houses of Congress, it’s clear that they are not running the show.)OK, I think I’ve covered most of the bases. I guess the only thing I’ve left out is how having a darkie in the Black House will ruin America. But I have faith that Brick Oven Shill will be along shortly with his usual blackety-black-black spiel.
chopper
We need to counter the shock wave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates.
Morbo
Of course they’re fiscal conservatives. If we just cut the tax rate to 0, the government will have infinite revenue!
K. Grant
Sung to the tune of Spam.
Bloody Vikings.
roseyv
>“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,”
I’ve always assumed that this quote had absolutely nothing to do with the actual economy, but rather that “deficits don’t matter” in the sense you can have huge deficits and still get re-elected, still be adored by the press, still control the country, etc. I mean, yeah, sure the economy will be in the dumper, and actual American citizens will suffer terribly as a result, but that’s their problem, not ours.
Unless I misunderstood Cheney’s meaning, it seems as apt a summary as any of the neocon worldview.
licensed to kill time
Power has been out since Monday, just back online. All I have to say is Fuck Reagan, Fuck Cheney, Fuck Bush, Fuck Republicans, fuckity fuck fuck fuck ’em all.
Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Also.
Makewi
They are not, but many would like them to be.