Picture this scenario. You are driving down the highway. Some idiot comes up behind you at about a hundred miles an hour and starts tailgating you. He's honking his horn, flipping you off, and then starts bumping into your car from the back. Then he swings out along side you, tries to smash you off the road a couple of times, and then while you're trying to get control of your car he pulls out a gun and points it at you. You slam on your brakes and immediately get flattened by 16 of the 18 wheels on a semi. When the police ask everyone what happened, the guy tells them the accident is your fault because you are the one who slammed on your brakes.
It is hard to know what is more galling at this point. Is it worse that the Republicans, led by our own Senator Mitch McConnell, inflicted the wound they did on our economy? Or is it worse now that we're bleeding they are just blinking and saying "Who me? No... not me. It was, um... that guy!"
Or is the most galling thing of all that lying like this has become their modus operandi. It is simply the way they do business now.
At Fancy Farm Saturday, McConnell, ever the careful parser of words, grinned like a sheepish schoolboy as he spouted off that Kentucky's unemployment rate is higher under President Obama and Governor Beshear than at anytime in recent memory. As if we wake up each morning for the first time and have no way of knowing what the problem with our economy is and when it happened. As if we were not paying attention during the last 19 months as he went about his business of doing anything and everything to "make sure Barack Obama is a one term president" regardless of the economic damage done to our country or the impoverishment of our people.
Rand Paul, as my colleague Thomas McAdam has written about, is out today blaming all of our woes on Timothy Geithner... of all people. Astoundingly, after choking the country to within an inch of its life, he says the problem is that he didn't get to choke us the rest of the way. He is still saying that the policy he brought us to the brink of death in order to force us to adopt is the right policy. Nobody with any understanding of economics agrees with him. Nobody! But the shameless drumbeat goes on.
It isn't surprising that Republicans don't want to own the economy they created. It isn't surprising that Republicans don't want to own the lack of improvement in the economy that they have stopped from happening. It isn't surprising that Republicans don't want to own the downgrading of America's credit rating that they made happen. What is surprising is that they can ever sleep at night.
When Bill Mahr asked Christina Romer, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, the other day "How f***ed are we?" she replied "Pretty darn f***ed." It's worth noting that she lost her job for committing that biggest of scandals in Washington. She wouldn't stop telling the truth.
