More on Rehberg & Stimulus

by: cleveland

Tue Feb 17, 2009 at 05:51:17 AM MST

Well, Denny is out there trying to make the GOP Congressional talking points stick to the wall.

My favorite quote: "This is not free money," Rehberg said.

Well, Denny, were the Bush tax cuts for the richest of the rich free money?  Was the Iraq War free money?  Tax cuts for the rich?  Good.  A couple trillion to "free Iraq"? Good.  $300 billion in middle class tax cuts? Bad.  $600 million in fiscal relief for the state of Montana? Bad.

The most interesting part of the interview is that Congressional Republicans are offering no solutions.  Their talking points amount to: This is bad.  

I also found his analogy comparing a rail-system to link Las Vegas (2 million people) to greater LA (14 million) to the bridge to nowhere to be completely absurd.  

Montanans are losing their jobs.  The GOP made a political gambit that if the stimulus worked Obama would get the credit, so they opposed it, or they thought it needed more tax cuts for the richest of the rich, so they opposed it.

As Mr. Rich noted on Sunday:

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn't happen either.

Americans are expecting a new, New Deal.  The modern day ideology of GOP, their own echo chamber-swirling with Russ Limbaugh's voice and their own talking points, are running the party off a cliff.

Thank God, they are in the minority now:  for the past 8 years they ran the country off a cliff, at least now, it is just their own future.