Tweet
Cynthia Tucker quotes two of her commenters, first, a conservative who makes, she says, some good points on why the recent outrage at so many Town Hells, and at the [teabaggers'] demonstrations, are justified, considering our severe financial crisis of confidence, before she writes:
But I doubt that the tens of thousands who marched on Washington on Saturday would have been there if John McCain had been elected and the deficit was the same. I can’t believe those conservatives/libertarians would have mounted the same demonstration against a Republican president.
Are they aware that the largest two-year tax cut in U.S. history — $282 billion — was enacted as part of Obama’s stimulus package.
Then, she quotes a more liberal commenter on the actual numbers and percentages involved, comparing Democratic and Republican presidents, and the amount of federal deficit they began and ended with. Democrats win this one.
Paraphrasing the second commenter… Nixon (1975) was the last Republican president to leave office with the federal deficit as a smaller percentage of GDP than when he went took office. Eisenhower (1961), was the last Republican president to leave office with the federal deficit at less than 2.7% of GDP. No Democratic president, since WWII, has left office with the federal deficit of more than 2.6% of GDP. Nor has any Democratic president, since WWII, left office with a higher deficit as percentage of GDP, than when he took office.
Tucker deserves some props for writing about this philosophical– and fiscal– inconsistency issue [read: hypocrisy] so concisely. And so do two of her commenters.
4 Comments
Thanks, Karen. It is interesting to wonder how many anti-McCain teabaggers there would be.
Zip? Nada? Zilch?
That’s my guess, Jim. For one thing, I suspect there is a lot of overlap between the ‘baggers and the birthers.
And, then, too, McCain did not seem very keen to forward any of the bailout efforts.
Yet, I think Tucker’s point holds… that if he had been elected and the deficit had reached a similar point (most of it under Bush!), there would not have been the outrage. More likely, McCain would have channeled that anger into creating more fronts for warmaking.
Also consider who has funded and advertised the ‘tea bagger’ so called grass roots so called movement. Misogynistic blowhard and congenital liar Dick Armey, pushed along by the blubbering ‘Obama hates White People’ Glenn POS Beck.
Absolutely! No way is their “movement” anything resembling grassroots, Kitt.
It’s astro-turf all the way!