Bring out your Dead!

Remember early on during the Bush years all those Republicans who suddenly threw down the mantle of "fiscal responsibility" and donned proudly the one labelled "John Maynard Keynes" as they happily pushed through Bush's tax cuts for the rich?  Yes, deficit spending was suddenly in vogue with a Republican in the White House . . . it mattered not what kind of deficit spending Keynes actually prescribed to combat a recession (needless to say, tax cuts for the wealthy were not what Keynes had in mind).  And . . . don't forget that laugher of a Laffer curve: like that unfortunate old gaffer in the "Bring out your Dead!" bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that little gem of Reagonomics still is not "dead yet", despite being thoroughly discredited many times over.

I really wonder what is going on the heads of Republican lawmakers as we teeter on the precipice of Great Depression 2.0.  Marshall is losing it:

I cannot say my expectations were high. But Sen. DeMint (R) of South Carolina does seem to be an even bigger ignoramus than I'd realized. On This Week this morning he actually said: "Let's don't say it's a stimulus when it's a government spending plan." A 'Stimulus plan' is pretty much by definition a spending plan, though of course it can include tax reductions as well.

As noted, my expectations are not high. But I'm wowed by the amount of nonsense and lies that are being injected into this debate.

Also, high on the list, of course, is the fact that basically all the 'wasteful' spending that's being discussed amounts to a total of what ... maybe 2 or 3 billion out of $819 billion total? Why is this point not being made more clearly?

It's enough to make one want to swing a cat around in the middle of a medieval plague!