Each day at matins, Republicans chant a near-religious mantra against the Obama Administration's stimulus efforts: government spending bad. But there is a significant, overlooked problem for them with this.
Never mind, of course, that while they want tax cuts instead, it's Bush tax cuts that helped get us into this Bush recession. And never mind, too, that Republicans, when in charge, aggressively spend enough to dig a trillion dollar deficit.
Never mind all that.
The problem for Republican cries against stimulus spending is its contradiction of one of the most cherished of G.O.P. Talking Points.
On the one hand, we have Republicans complaining that government spending doesn't stimulate the economy during a recession.
On the other hand, Republicans insist (erroneously) that America only got out of the Great Depression because of World War II - not President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies.
In case you missed it, here's the contradictory problem for them:
Republicans are arguing that the building of airplanes, the creation of ships, munitions, equipment, the acquisition of provisions, troop training - all "government spending" - indeed, massive spending - is what pulled America from the Depression.
(Contrary to popular belief, battleships and jet bombers do not just spontaneously generate themselves. No, really!)
Of course, that also brings us back to the erroneous argument in the first place. Several months back on ABC's "This Week," George Will attempted to use the "Roosevelt spending didn't turn around the Depression" Gambit. However, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was on the same panel, and he lectured a silent Will how New Deal programs actually did improve the economy, and it was only when Roosevelt acquiesced to Republicans...and stopped spending and instead cut taxes...that the 1937 recession occurred. When FDR returned to spending, and later World War II began, only then did the U.S. economy grow again and solidify.
So, in both cases, it's a no-win argument against government spending. It's just that the argument Republicans have been trying to use is the contradictory one.
That's become the pattern for the G.O.P.: trying to block the new administration by attempting to justify their Bush-era actions - and contradicting themselves in the process. Hoping no one will notice.
Like a week ago last Sunday, there was former Vice President Dick Cheney on CNN, interviewed by John King. Twisting himself into his own contradiction.
(Why CNN felt compelled to have Mr. Cheney on is a mystery. With his approval rating around the level of poison mushrooms, the network couldn't possibly think anyone rational would care to hear from him so soon, or...well, ever. But I digress.)
Mr. Cheney was asked about coming into office with a budget surplus of $128 billion and leaving with a record deficit of $1.3 trillion. His response was breathtaking in its cruel disdain and - disingenuous contradictions.
"Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11. We had 3,000 Americans killed one morning by al Qaeda terrorists here in the United States. We immediately had to go into the wartime mode. We ended up with two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of that is still very active. We had major problems with respect to things like Katrina, for example. All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend, or weren't originally part of the budget. Stuff happens."
There you have it. Stuff happens.
We had two wars, and so the economy crumbled. Stuff happens. Except that - the Republican argument about FDR is that he also had two wars, in Europe against Germany and against Japan in the Pacific...and that's what got us out of the Depression.
Go figure.
Hard to work your way out of that contradiction.
Moreover, blaming Katrina is equally contradictory (and more pathetic) - because the criticism of the Bush administration is that they didn't spend the money needed to address the disaster. You can't under-spend and claim that it was your unexpected spending that hurt you.
But of course, the biggest contradiction is when Dick Cheney contorts the starting point. What the Bush Administration had to deal with coming into office was a budget surplus. What FDR had to deal with upon taking office was..the Great Freaking Depression.
And Bush failed.
And FDR succeeded.
Stuff happens, Dick Cheney callously says. It makes the skin crawl. What cold-hearted, criminal arrogance. No one forced the Bush administration to falsify evidence for WMDs, ignore hurricane warnings and cut taxes during a war. They chose to do this. It's like holding a gun to someone's head, pulling the trigger and shrugging - "Stuff happens."
The next time some Republican mouthpiece tries to insist that up is down, and listen to us, we know how to get America out of the economic disaster our party caused, just know they are being contradictory. Again. You can tell because their lips are moving.
The Republican Party has become a party unable to find its moral center, so instead it's flailed away at all contradictory options, and hoped no one would notice. But as the founder of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, famously noted: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
And Americans have figured it out.