OK – quick quiz time…ready? Is a proposed “budget” that doesn’t include actual numbers in it any kind of budget at all…or is it just apparently some kind of promotional prop to distract from the unfocused flailings of an opposition party with no true ideas beyond the simple, repeated use of the word “No”? (Or, in the words of NBC’s Chuck Todd, “Isn’t that like selling a car without wheels?”)
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the
So, there we all were last week, watching the ongoing governmental attempts at stimulating, bailing out, and all-around reviving the
Well, not in “The Republican Road to Recovery.” While Spinal Tap-ster Nigel Tufnel’s amplifiers famously “go to 11,” the GOP proposed budget for 2010 apparently only goes to zero…
Almost immediately, Boehner and others started spinning. Their circular argument went something like this: Since the President announced his budget a few days before all of its details were nailed down, can’t we do the same? Here we are crowing, but…uh, we’ll come up with more details (like actual figures) later. Well, perhaps – but nobody in the Administration was waving around produced little packets (full of colorful graphs and flow charts that went nowhere), claiming that it was the answer to the economic crisis, then asking for patience when it gets pointed out that budgets normally have numbers in them, showing how much money is going to be spent on what items.
After that showy roll-out, the reactions were honest and amusing. It seems as though many observers are getting used to the “Party of ‘No’” and their desert-wandering activities of the past 28 months. Reporters on the spot started paging through the attractive, yet mostly empty booklets and began asking where the details were. Former GOP Congressman – and current perhaps-most-conservative-voice (except for the gently humored ravings of ol’ Uncle Pat Buchanan) on MSNBC – Joe Scarborough reacted by saying, “They wanted to rush and get in front of the cameras and because they did, they made fools of themselves.” The numberless GOP budget even prompted a joke query on the “Yahoo Answers” website (where users post questions they want others to respond to) – “Which is thicker, the Republican budget or 3-ply toilet paper?” (Well, that must be a trick question, right? Because, of course, the GOP budget is already symbolically smeared with…well, you know what I mean.)
The negative reactions even spread through the rampaging elephants’ own ranks. Behind-the-scenes word strongly had it that even two of the prominent Republicans who were part of the team that developed the budget – House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (OH) and Rep. Paul Ryan (WI), the Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee – were against it being released so haphazardly, prior to completion. They were apparently shouted down by Boehner and Rep. Mike Pence (IN), the Chairman of the House Republican Conference. (And, by the way – OH twice, WI, IN…say, when did my Upper Midwest / Great Lakes region become the unofficial headquarters of the GOP’s most strident worker ants? Ah, at least here in
Looking back, it almost becomes ultimately ironic (as well as still wincingly stupid) that the most recent Republican President famously described his first budget like some kind of an amazed first-grader by explaining, "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." But, of course, who knew then that George W. Bush’s semi-idiotic statement would be clearly topped in thickness by an entire gang of Republican elected officials just 8 years later?
…Say what you will about our former (alleged) Dry-Drunk-in-Chief (and, quite frankly, I’ve said and written PLENTY about him before), but at least even he knew that a federal budget needs to have some – and probably “a lot of” – numbers in it…
Cross-Posted on The Stonecipher Report.
