Sullivan laughs at a Captain Ed quote, but misses the better quote:
First, the Republicans need to re-establish credibility as the party of fiscal responsibility, and supporting Porkulus is antithetical to that effort. No matter how big a tent the Republicans need to pitch, they still need to stand for core values — and among them should be fiscal responsibility and smaller government for greater individual liberty. Porkulus fails on both counts, which is why the House GOP maintained a solid wall of opposition to it. Specter, Snowe, and Collins apparently don’t share those values.
About those core values- how well are they holding up to the test of time? Not very well, it seems. A couple graphs:
And none of these graphs include the violence done to the budget in the last year of the Bush administration. Long story short- even during the years of Republican Jesus Ronald Reagan, Republicans were never “fiscal conservatives.” It took me some time to come to terms with it, too, because I deified Reagan with the best of them and still have my ‘Peace Through Stregnth’ buttons from the 80’s, but you just can’t argue with the facts.
And just because I am full of spite and like to rub things in, let me point to this:
I find it amazing that the Republicans who doubled the debt of the country in eight years and produced no new jobs doing it, gave us an economic record that was totally bereft of any productive result are now criticizing him for spending money. You know, I’m a fiscal conservative, I balanced the budget, I ran surpluses.
That was Bill Clinton, aka the Clenis. That should leave a mark. The Republican response to their utter failure? To run around hollering “porkulus” and releasing Aerosmith videos.
Laura W
Josh Marshall just accused McCain and Repubs of "concern trolling" on Shuster. And whining. Twice.
Ha.
Svensker
I’ve never been a huge Clenis fan (er, maybe I should rephrase that…) — but I LOVE the man who said this. LOVE him.
Heh. Indeed. Also!
demkat620
@Laura W: Yeah, I’ve been reading JMM since 2003. He is one of the best in the progressive blogosphere. He rarely gets the accolades he deserves.
The bit about the whining was great. Can he be on my TV more?
TenguPhule
That’s because the real Core Values of the GOP are:
1. Rich Dicks
2. Fuck the Poor
3. Hate the Liberals
4. More
DahkaTAX CUTS5. Commies are Islamo-Socialists
6. Fear the Other
7. Rights for me, none for thee
8. It’s not gay as long as our balls don’t touch
SpotWeld
Repbulicans promise a trip to the moon and then mock anyone who points out that Newark isn’t the moon.
Democrats (at least in recent history) promise a trip to Cleavland and then get mocked by Republicans when they deliver a trip to Cleavland.
Stuck
House wingnuts unfold their secret plan for credibility. Run around praising them selves for helping the projects in the bill they opposed. It’s all part of the Great Wingnut golden comeback.
There’s more–"Young boasted that he "won a victory for the Alaska Native contracting program and other Alaska small business owners last night in H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.""
JL
Gee, I turned off MSNBC after J. D. Hayworth’s meltdown on Hardball.
Repubs best friends forever live on K Street and it’s important to reward your friends. Forget about the repubs being fiscal conservatives.
Laura W
@demkat620: They share guests sometimes so perhaps he’ll reappear on Rachel or KO.
Alan
Yeah, you’ve got to embrace the cognitive dissonance. It’s the slogans and bromides that really matter. It’s not what the GOP does. I’ve got Boortz, Limbaugh, and Hannity to keep me in line. And anyway, the Democrats are worse–damn gay socialist marxist baby killers. Give me limited government.
Napoleon
@Laura W:
He was on Suster? Damn, I missed him. He is the best the left has.
demkat620
@Laura W: I like him. I wish we had more like him and Cliff Schecter on the TV. I hate that all we get are weak ass people like Steve McMahon or idiots like Terry McAsshat. We need more and better democrats on the TV.
Just Some Fuckhead
@demkat620: Terry McAsshat is running to be my governor. I get daily robocalls from Terry McAsshat.
Laura W
@Napoleon: He’s pretty good with the self-pimping. He’ll probably have the clip up at TPM shortly, no?
Just Some Fuckhead
Virginia really needs to overturn the one-term gubernatorial limit. We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I think it’s my turn next time.
Laura W
@Just Some Fuckhead: Mr. Fuckhead, red courtesy phone please, Mr. Fuckhead.
Sam Simple
Expect the Republicans to trot out Larry Sinclair soon – a homosexual reprise of Paula Jones. All things in history happen twice – first as tragedy and then as farce.
Conservatively Liberal
Fix’t.
I have to admit that the Rushublicans have been pretty entertaining since losing their asses last fall. Their reality has been shattered and their solution is to glue the mirror back together and hope nobody notices.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Laura W: We’re sorry, we’re not available to take your call, please..
Montysano
The Josh Marshall clip is up at MSNBC (it won’t let me post a direct link).
But so far, no Hayworth. Anyone seen it anywhere? Sounds like must-see teevee.
Brick Oven Bill
As much as I dislike Bill Clinton, I have to admit that he was a much better President than George Bush. And that is a mouthful.
Thah-dump.
NS
Luckily, there are pills for this. I even heard that Rush has a few extra.
Jrod
But Clinton is personally responsible for the 9/11 attacks that happened eight months into Bush’s term! How could he possibly be a better Preznit? Next you’ll be telling me that the financial crisis isn’t really Jimmy Carter’s fault!
Napoleon
@Montysano:
Just fininshed replaying on Hardball now. I hope the Reps put Hayworth out there every single time they need someone on tv. Also Ford kicked his ass.
Montysano
That was quite a (well deserved) shout-out that Shuster gave to Josh Marshall.
srv
Has anyone written the treatise yet that W’s Tax Cuts are now a proven failure because they did not prevent this meltdown?
Conservatively Liberal
I just heard J.D. Hayworth on Tweety’s show, and was that ever a meltdown. If that fucker thinks he sounds convincing he needs medical help. He was doing everything he could to steamroll Tweety with a mountain of bullshit, trying to weasel out of the question (do you prefer the last eight years of Bush rather than the direction Obama is trying to take us).
Harold Ford needs to give us his best right now so I hope he has an ‘accident’ involving superglue and his lips that prevents him from going on talk shows for the foreseeable future.
Zifnab
@srv: Are you kidding? They’re a total success! Imagine how bad the meltdown would have been without them.
demkat620
@Just Some Fuckhead: Oh, I am so sorry to hear that. Vote for Brian Moran!
JL
@Montysano: Try searching again after 8. Since it repeats at 7, maybe they don’t put the videos until after 8. Just a thought. Thanks for the link for the Marshall interview.
Ninerdave
…but…but John, 9/11 changed everything. We all know that if 9/11 wouldn’t have happened we’d be sitting on a $10 quadrillion surplus. And you know that since the Dems also voted for these budgets, it’s their fault, they could have filibustered the bills.
jnfr
Marshall/Shuster already up on Youtube.
Brick Oven Bill
Jrod asks: How could he possibly be a better Preznit?
Bill Clinton was smart enough to stay away from the Middle East, and just cut deals with the dictators. I served in the Middle East under Bill Clinton, and was involved with this in a very small way. In hindsight, his was the smart way to go.
George Bush decided it was his job to educate Middle Eastern women. I am surprised that Bush did push for female drivers licenses.
I hope the new President is not as arrogant as George Bush. Societies should be allowed to live according to their traditions. I completely disagree with our engagement with Afghanistan.
torrentprime
Reading that whole Morrissey piece, what the hell is this:
a huge reduction in the health-care bureaucracy that comprised almost half of Porkulus
Did that lying, fear-mongering piece by Betsy McCaughey somehow morph in their brains into "half" of the stimulus package?
Jrod
Right, Clinton stayed out of the middle east by bombing the shit out of Iraq every couple years while making multiple attempts to kill bin Laden. Of course, he was just doing these things to distract from the real issue of the day, which was that he got a beej from an intern. That’s what the Repubs had to say about it at the time.
Later on, it was revealed that Clinton hadn’t done enough to fight terror, therefore 9/11 was his fault! That what I hear from conservatives, anyway. Meanwhile, the depression that started during Bush’s term is in fact Obama’s fault, because blargity booboo blarg.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Bush is the greatest man to ever live, and I know this because that’s what I hear from Republican retards. So, BoB, congrats on not being as retarded as your compatriots.
PaminBB
At the rate they are going, the Repubs aren’t going to need to be pitching tents of any size, what with everyone wearing white hoods and robes. The only tents they’ll be welcome in have three rings.
Rainy
I’ve been telling my friends this as well. I wanted them to name a fiscally conservative President. They always say Reagan. When I told them Reagan left a 300 billion or so deficit, they don’t want to talk anymore.
Zzyzx
Here’s a bit from the comments section in that article:
Ummm idiot, you just explained why there was a spending package instead of the tax cuts you wants, while trying to argue that a spending package was the wrong move. Beyond parody indeed.
The Moar You Know
I call horseshit on Bill’s quote.
I love the man, but really. He added quite a bit to the national debt. It didn’t double under his administration as it did under every Republican administration since Ford’s – but it increased:
year debt in billions
1980 930.2
1990 3,233
2000 5,674
2005 7,933
2007 9,008
2008 10,699
See any decrease between 1990 and 2000? Neither do I.
Clinton needs to STFU about his "fiscal responsibility".
El Cid
Bill Clinton
iscan be really, really good at saying the most important things in very few words.We would have been much better off with this Democratic introduction of the ‘stimulus’ / ARRA bill:
Xel
If refuckedintheadlicans do not experience a complete lack of power until they have done the kind of difficult self-improvement worthy of a Lifetime movie I will claim that the democratic party is a dog’s party.
Seriously, these people are the fucking anathema of a little baby’s happiness upon seeing his mother. They would shoot a kitten with a rusty bullet if they were told such an act would protect a soldier who beat up defenseless men in Abu Ghraib from facing any repercussion whatsoever. The people who made these eight years what they were are getting off easy and if they get a branch of government in 2010 there will be seppuku.
Cat Lady
@TenguPhule:
Win.
John Cole
@The Moar You Know: He did not say he didn’t add debt, and if you asked him, he would tell you that of course they added debt. Things were such a mess that budget surpluses were not realized until late in his administration.
Two things of note- none of these numbers deal with the off budget obligations, and the simple fact of the matter is we had a budget surplus going into 2001. Now, not so much.
ksmiami
I think they (the Republicans) have seriously miscalculated though and if they continue to just act like assholes, even if the economy is still crawling, that won’t be a reason to elect them… I see no empathy or real intelligence in the now southern rump, religious party called the GOP. They are mean motherfuckers and I mean that literally these guys would fuck their own mothers if it would lead them to more power. They really hold no appeal to people who are sane.
joe from Lowell
If you look at the graph, Moar, you see that the annual deficit shrunk every single year under Clinton, then actually turned into a surplus.
So, no, he didn’t go from the $200 billion+ deficit under Poppy Bush to a balanced budget in a year, but that doesn’t detract from what that trend line shows.
El Cid
and
This. I needed this. More of this.
Sometimes it gets really old living in a world where like a few of the people in power are basically talking a language and making sense, and then all the other people in politics and on the radio and the TV show are involved in some strange, nonsense maneuvers in a language based in small gestures made with the hand and fart noises and bags of shit ceremoniously lifted as if gold.
The crazy people all deal with each other as though they understand what’s going on, and really all it is is more crazy, except for the fact that the full-on crazy is so distracting it allows the crazy people to shoplift and pickpocket unnoticed, because people are trying to figure out why they are holding a bag of shit someone just handed them.
ksmiami
El Cid – I would have committed suicide had I not found blogs, John Stewart and Lewis Black….
I quit the MSM in 2002 and am so much happier and I don’t think I am the only one seeing as Barack got elected.
Shiva
If you watch Reagan’s last address to the country in 1989, he mentions the deficit as one thing he regrets. Reagan ran large deficits, but like Obama, Reagan had quite a mess to clean up. Not that I agree with everything that Reagan said or did. But even though Reagan really did run up huge deficits, at least he had the decency to be embarrassed about it.
Lihtox
That second graph is really interesting– and what is it about Bushes and deficit spendings? At least in the last couple of years in Reagan’s term the deficit actually pulled back a little bit, but under both Bushes (and Ford) it’s just a freefall. I don’t normally think of 41 and 43 as having a lot in common, but that really stands out (though of course W’s plunge is much larger).
Anoniminous
@Rainy:
‘Tis a cruel harsh world and facts are SO annoying.
Stuck
@Shiva:
I remember the first house I bought in 1982 and the interest was 14%, and that was with a VA loan. The stagflation was rampant also, but they were problems that weren’t as deeply structural as now, and really were actually caused by sky high taxes and mindless spending (troll protection, not to include valuable progressive programs.) This time, Taxes aren’t sky high and the mindless spending has been almost exclusively from wingnut welfare. So there is something else wrong, and the biggest difference between now and then, I believe, is that the economy and business was regulated then, and not so much now.
Svensker
I once super-glued my hands together when I was home alone. It was a tense few hours.
My name is Hanes
The first black president carried on the failed policies of peanut farmer Carter so we know who bears the mark.
calling all toasters
These graphs mean nothing. "Fiscally conservative" means fucking the poor, the working class, and the middle class. No one does that better than our GOP.
Left Coast Tom
@Moar:
Well…what he said is that he ran surpluses, which he did. Obviously more deficits than surpluses, but he did run surpluses, and he didn’t double the debt.
And at the very least, debt decreased overall as a percent of GDP. http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
He shouldn’t have to be praised for reduction of debt as a percent of GDP…since the end of WW-II every president managed this feat until Reagan and Bush came along. But looking at the record since 1980 the feat looks far more impressive than it should.
jcricket
How about, Sorry about that Laffer and trickle-down stuff, they weren’t true.
More importantly, I apologize in advance for ruining the financial condition of America and all political discourse about taxes by making everyone believe that you can have your cake and eat it to. You’ll be climbing out of the hole I dug for 50 years. My bad.
BDeevDad
Question: Since SS and Medicare are paid by a different revenue stream, is it dishonest or at least misleading to include them in discussions about income and corporate taxes?
calling all toasters
@The Moar You Know:
Um, OK. Clinton was only the most fiscally responsible President we ever had. What was he supposed to do, turn a $300 billion dollar deficit into a surplus in one year? And, you might have heard, we still had to pay interest on the $3.2 trillion debt he inherited. Meaning that without action, the deficit was going to increase rapidly. But don’t you worry about that– just snipe away knowing that someone could have done better. No one ever has, but whatever.
Chuck Butcher
There is the myth of St Ronnie and then there is the actuality of RR. What was Iran/Contra? What was Beruit and the known location of the people? What was the tax policy? What social advances occurred? In actual point of fact what was there beyond pretty talk? Surely you’re not going to credit him with the Soviet implosion?
Jeeze, I suppose one does have to credit him with success in Grenada…if you could think of a smaller ass to kick.
I’ll let them have their mythological hero, but to supplant Licoln with Reagan is laughable on a scale too large to measure.
GuyFromOhio
"porkulus" ? You’re serious, the culture ninjas are actually using that in a sentence?
It’s like something from "Spaceballs".
"The Porkulans are attacking!"
Just Some Fuckhead
@calling all toasters: Actually, it was Jackson, the founder of the Democratic party.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@calling all toasters:
Interestingly enough, Nate Silver over at 538 has a post up that, while isn’t on this topic directly, does touch on this.
Expand the whole thing, and check that graph. The bottom tenth percentile in incomes went up over 17 percent under Clinton.
Looks like realfiscal conservatism is pretty good for the poor, the working and middle classes.
opit
Fiscal conservatism. Well, this is the balloon blog. Better hope this anaysis isn’t right and she’s losing air fast
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/schoon/2009/0213.html
Chuck Butcher
@opit:she’s losing air fast
I don’t think the government is exaggerating, actually I’d guess minimizing is more the case, but gold standard twits are just that – twits.
They act as though you can do something with a gold coin if you melt the fucker down, do what? They act as though there is some intrinsic value to gold, some "god ordained value" to it. It is worth exactly what somebody is willing to trade you for it, just the same as that piece of paper. Any medium of exchange is a symbol unless you directly barter goods and avoid symbolism. No, you can’t make jewelry or circuitry out of paper but that jewelry is worth exactly what goods somebody is willing to trade for it.
Now if you devalue your dollar with inflation a commodity – gold – costs more per dollar but that doesn’t mean it is somehow an ordained medium of exchange, it just means it is a fairly scarce commodity. Coinage was developed because it was a lot more convenient to trade coin for a wagon than boxes of chickens and the coins didn’t die in transport. The idea that banking credit began with the issuance of paper is ludicrous, I don’t honestly know if there is writing that pre-dates lending…and interest.
You can certainly make some real interesting arguements about whether some of the most recent banking instruments had any intrinsic value whatever, evidence says no since an ugly collapse in housing turned into a catastrophy on their backs. Someone recently tried to tie my disgust with the imaginary value of stocks to money, money already had a valuation on the basics of those companies, people chose to ignore that and imagine that stocks in themselves meant something other than what their paper dollar could puchase every piece of that company for.
The biggest problem with using a scarce commodity as a medium of exchange is that since it is used industrially and is scarce you’re farther ahead to bury it than to spend it or otherwise move it around because it will appreciate due to its increasing scarcity and increasing demand despite whatever the economy is doing. Now it might seem a fine thing that your buried money is worth more in ten years than when you buried it, but capitalism works because money moves around pretty freely (note its not moving now and there is a real problem) and its not moving if it is buried. You have 3 real risks if its buried, 1) theft 2) it is industrially replace by a cheaper commodity 3) somebody finds a really big deposit of it. The other nasty in commodity based exchange is that somebody will game production – see DeBeers and diamonds.
GOP08_DOA
"Porkulus!!!" The battle cry of the dittoheads. They’re just gross. Apparently, they cant’ help it.