Since declaring for the presidency a few weeks ago, Rick Perry, the GOP Texas Tornado – a blast of hot air with a lot of destructive potential –  has been amusing those of us with a taste for political absurdities with almost every utterance. By now, almost everyone in the civilized world has heard that Perry is convinced that not only is Social Security unconstitutional, but it is actually a big government “Ponzi scheme.”  As Jonathan Bernstein observes, such an assertion means only that “Perry either doesn’t understand Social Security, doesn’t understand Ponzi schemes or is simply not telling the truth.”  

Perry may not understand what a Ponzi scheme really is, but the underlying meme – that the Social Security reserve will be exhausted before today’s young workers reach retirement – is a staple of GOP rhetoric. It rears its ugly head right away in a scheme to “reform” Social Security that Missouri Senator Roy Blunt proposed on July 12:

Blunt doesn’t talk about Ponzi schemes explicitly – maybe because, unlike Perry, he actually knows what one is. He does, however, press the case that because the ratio of those paying into the system to those drawing benefits will continue to decrease for some years (he claims, falselly,that it is a permanent situation), it will not be able to support future retirees. Blunt’s argument is that half a loaf is better than none, and that we must cut the benefits of future retirees in order to ensure that they get anything at all.  

 

Problem is, the story about a soon-to-be bankrupt Social Security is pure fiction:

The Social Security trustees project now that payroll taxes will fall below benefit payments in 2010 and 2011, exceed benefit payments from 2012 to 2014, and then continuously exceed benefit payments through 2015 [14]. The interest and principal from the bonds in the trust funds will help to cover the cash shortfall after 2015 through 2037 [15]. The date of final trust fund exhaustion has not changed from the trustees projections made in 2009. The program can pay on average 78 percent of its promised benefits with its tax revenue from 2037 to 2085, if nothing changes

Let’s see – twenty four years down the road Social Security will have to pay out somewhat less to beneficiaries if nothing is done. So why is Blunt claiming that we have to cut future retirees’ benefits when that will happen automatically if we do nothing? And he’s not even telling the whole story about the damage he wants to do. He’s also proposing to calculate cost of living adjustments (colas) according to a chained CPI index that will cost current retirees at least $18,000 in benefits – although he explicitly claims that his proposal will not touch anyone 55 or older. Wonder why he wants to hide that particular fact? You think maybe he wants to be reelected? Or is he just blindly glomming onto the chained CPI index that happens to be popular among the GOP political set right now.

We can actually avoid the unappealing but far from dire benefit cuts predicted for 2035 very easily. Along with cutting benefits via chained CPI and raising the retirement age, Blunt proposes means testing. However, there would be little or no need to cut benefits if the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes were to be lifted in accord with any of several scenarios that have been put forward.  Instead of means testing, which weakens Social Security, make it stronger and let the wealthy pay their fair share – which, currently, is not the case:

The cap also means that higher-income individuals pay a smaller share of their income in Social Security taxes than middle-class employees. Including the employee and employer shares of Social Security and Medicare taxes, earners in the middle fifth of the income distribution pay an average effective payroll tax of about 11 percent. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners pay just 1.5 percent on average.

At any rate, it doesn’t sound like today’s 20 and 30 year old workers really need to worry about whether or not Social Security will be there for them – as long as politicians like Roy Blunt keep their hands off the program. Nevertheless, a 2010 Gallup poll showed that 76% of Americans between 18 and 34 do not believe that they will receive Social Security benefits when they retire.

Their misapprehension is not really surprising. Listen to Blunt spin the story about how Social Security will be all gone if we don’t hand the program over to folks like him to fix, folks who, like Rick Perry, think it’s unconstitutional, or, more likely in Blunt’s case, an affront to the sensibilities of their Wall Street cronies, and it’s easy to understand why young Americans are so skeptical about the future of their benefits. Since George Bush opened the war on Social Security with his call to privatization in 2005, we have been bombarded with talk of the coming Social Security crisis. Even Democrats like Claire McCaskill are glad to join in the chorus. In such circumstances, who wouldn’t believe that Social Security will soon be moribund?

Unfortunately, this particular story is not only false, but intellectually corrupt. Speaking of Perry’s Ponzi scheme allegation, Bernstein concludes that:

In my view, saying that Social Security is a deliberate fraud – a Ponzi scheme – is about as irresponsible as truther or birther conspiracy thinking.

As far as I’m concerned, misleading rhetoric and outright falsehoods about the status of Social Security is just as irresponsible – even without the simple-minded insinuation that it’s a conscious fraud – and ultimately far more pernicious.

Addenda:  Here’s what Ezra Klein has to say about Social Security vs. Ponzi schemes. Note that the only thing they have in common is GOP politicians who persist in erroneously comparing them.  

For GOP politicians striking the right note in the wake of the Tucson shootings is a delicate matter. Republicans are either quiet or defensive – as indeed behooves members of a party that has not exactly gone out on a limb to disavow “Second Amendment remedies.” Take a look at the twitter accounts of most Missouri GOPers from Sunday; if they mention Gabrielle Giffords at all, it is only to offer polite condolences for her unspecified misfortune. There’s certainly something to be said for decorum at a time like this, but, as Politico‘s David Catenese remarked about the silence emanating from GOP Senate challengers:

… in today’s world where it’s increasingly simple to communicate instantly, I found it curious that most candidates for the world’s greatest deliberative body haven’t yet found time or a way to offer their thoughts on what will be the dominant story of the weeks to come.

One exception was Todd Akin (R-2nd) who felt empowered to observe that Americans are free “to express their opinions, to argue and disagree. But this is in a totally different realm. It’s a whole different thing when you talk about murder.” No kidding! One wonders if Rep. Akin, who last year was willing to rile up the yahoos with jokes about lynching Democratic congresspeople, might have just discovered that it’s not a good thing for public figures to implicitly approve of or suggest violence?  

Some GOPers have already started playing defense, of course, and I expect that more of our Missourians will soon join the “who me” team as well. These guys know what they’ve been doing and they really don’t want to say sorry. We can already see their playbook taking form: Arizona’s Senator Jon Kyl remarked about the shooter, Jared Laughner, that “it’s probably giving him too much credit to ascribe a coherent political philosophy to him.” Laughner was just a whack job and you can’t blame Kyl or the GOP for all the whack jobs in the country, right?

When I hear such crass efforts to distance oneself and one’s political and ideological fellow-travelers from the violence in Tucson, Bill Clinton’s remarks at an event commemorating the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing come to my mind:

What we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or that we should reduce our passion for the positions we hold – but that the words we use really do matter, because there’s this vast echo chamber, and they go across space and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike. They fall on the connected and the unhinged alike …

One of the things that the conservatives have always brought to the table in America is a reminder that no law can replace personal responsibility. And the more power you have and the more influence you have, the more responsibility you have.

Only one Missouri politician has so far indicated that he understands the importance of personal responsibility as we go forward. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-5th) observed on “Meet the Press” that:

We are in a dark place in this country right now … . The hostility is here. People want to deny it, it is real. Members of Congress either need to turn down the volume, begin to try to exercise some high level of civility, or this darkness will never be overcome with light

I can already hear the more truculent citizens who have enjoyed the past two years of GOP-approved wilding whining about freedom of speech. Such misguided individuals I refer to Matthew Iglesias, who gets the correct response just right:

The idea that upholding important basic liberties requires us to refrain from moral criticism of misconduct is wildly misguided…. There’s something wrong, ethically speaking, with suggesting that your political opponents are orders of magnitude more monstrous than they really are. People who don’t want formal rules policing conduct have an especially strong interest in demonstrating that the absence of rules doesn’t mean a society in which there are no norms of conduct that encourage sociability, cooperation, etc.

In other words, we are personally responsible for our conduct, for what we say and how it influences others. Get it?

Fired Up Missouri! caught Missouri Freshman Rep. Vicky Harzler tweeting today. She was all giddy about her first speech and vote – to repeal “Obamacare,” a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The money quote: the ACA equals “job-killing, deficit-increasing, unconstitutional government takeover.” Apart from getting the prize for cramming the most dishonest talking points into one tweet, her statement is remarkable for another reason – it’s one more example of the way that the GOP is trying to use the recession to attack any and every piece of social legislation. They’re hoping that if they call something “job-killing,” which often, as in the case of the ACA, is patently untrue, they don’t need to do any heavy lifting to make their case.

These fools actually titled their silly, let’s-appease-the-tea-partiers bill the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” Talk about over-using a meme. Many, including Fired Up!, have pointed out that the ACA does the opposite of job-homicide, so I don’t need to address the issue here – it’s been done very well elsewhere. It is worth keeping in mind, though, that, as Steven Benen notes, the “job-killing” arguments aren’t just wrong, they’re backwards.”*

However, there’s another point that we overlook in our outrage at this distortion of the truth. As The Washington Post‘s Steven Pearlstein wrote in a must-read discussion of the intellectual dishonesty inherent in the the GOP misuse of this phrase:

What’s particularly noteworthy about this fixation with “job killing” is that it stands in such contrast to the complete lack of concern about policies that kill people rather than jobs

Pearlstein lists numerous examples of legislation that Republicans have opposed that have a real effect on whether or not people live or die: food safety regulation most recently, mine-safety regulation; the list is endless, including the very “Obamacare” that Hartzler so blithely voted to kill:

Repealing health-care reform, for instance, would inevitably lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths each year because of an inability to get medical care.

And lest you think this is an exaggeration, today we read that another person has died as a result of the Arizona GOP’s rationing of health care. That’s the world the Republican House, including Ms. Hartzler, wants for us all.  

So is anybody tweeting Hartzler back, asking her why she’s so copacetic with “people-killing” legislation- the repeal legislation, that is?** Could it have anything to do with the fact that she’s got her good government health-care all wrapped-up, so “handout nation,” which, given the trajectory of health-care costs, will soon be most of us, can go to hell?

*Sentence slightly edited; eight words added at beginning.

** five words added at the end of this sentence

If I were to try to find a descriptive label for the political atmosphere in 2009, I would call it the year of the tantrum because of all the displays of thwarted fury that took place in the wake of the election of the first African-American president. Who can forget the right-wing tantrums that took place wherever Tea Party mobs hijacked congressional town halls or congregated to inflate the weight of their essentially minority demands. While the rage continued unabated in 2010, one might better characterize last year in terms of the bait used to snare those same angry Tea Partiers – any one of the numerous iterations of the big lie that has become the currency of the modern GOP.  

That fringewingers have been boiling over isn’t really anything new as those of us know who can remember the McCarthyist “better dead than red” protests and the original John Birchers. What was worth remarking, though, was the degree to which the Teople were worked up over things that just weren’t true – nonexistent death panels, fictional FEMA detention camps, or the imaginary threat of the great Obama gun confiscation for example.

This year, as GOP pols and their corporate supporters doubled down in their efforts to retake the congress, they also doubled down in their willingness to exploit what has been revealed as the almost limitless gullibility of those over-Foxified and Limbaughed individuals who inhabit the fact-free zone of GOP propaganda. GOP politicians have been liberated; they are free to deny obvious facts at will and make any outlandish claim, secure in the knowledge that they will never be held accountable by their base.

Missouri, of course, saw its share of political lies during the past year, but to my mind, there are two GOP pols who excelled in the rarefied art of bilking the suckers. Ed Martin who lost his race against Russ Carnahan for the 3rd district House seat, and Roy Blunt who beat Robin Carnahan for retiring Senator Kit Bond’s Senate seat. (You, of course, may have other candidates, and I would welcome your arguments for them in the comments if you are so inclined.)

It’s hard to know where to start when describing the excesses of Ed Martin, who seems to have mislaid whatever capacity he possessed to tell the truth as soon as he started his campaign. He started out by pretending that Carnahan had defaulted on debates that, contrary to Martin’s claims, he never agreed to, and finished by fabricating absurd claims of election fraud. In between, his campaign featured a multitude of spurious claims about his rival, among the most creative of which was his contention that Carnahan, along with his pal, the Obama boogyman, would come between Missourians and their religious “salvation.” The trouble with Martin, though, is that so little that he said had any relationship to truth that, after awhile, most of us found his fantasy life a little boring.

As truth challenged as Martin proved to be, probably the most overwhelming triumph of big-lie politics in Missouri was the election of Roy Blunt to the Senate. In part, this is because Blunt, a scandal-tinged insider who, during the Bush years, presided over a a GOP dominated House that helped drive the deficit to astronomical heights while simultaneously trashing the economy, managed to coast to election with promises to “fight to restore accountability” to Washington.

A plaid-shirted Blunt, who in his long-time Washington incarnation plays the role of a glossy socialite, tooled around the state in a rented pick-up, kissing up to any and every rural prejudice. After disrespecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security like a good GOP pol really wants to do, he not only denied his own words, but ran ads falsely implying that Carnahan’s support for the Affordable Care Act, would translate into cuts in Medicare benefits. He lied about his votes against the minimum wage. He even sunk so low that in the course of bragging about his GOP boiler-plate “jobs plan” he lied about its length, adding a good 80 pages.

This partial list of Blunt’s transgressions against the truth, which offers just a few of our new Senator’s self-misrepresentations, is in itself a strong argument for giving Blunt the title of Missouri Liar of the Year. Martin seemed, most of the time at least, to lie about his opponent – and so outrageously as to be simply amusing – but Blunt created an entire false persona which he used to promote himself to the Senate. Besides, Martin lost and Blunt won,  and by winning on the basis of so many lies, he debased our political discourse just a little bit more. He has contributed one more cog in the devaluation of truth that we have seen taking place in our political world over the past decade, each inch taken, leading to another mile of democracy lost.  

Since I spent some time examining how Todd Akin (R-2) has tried to spin his support for extending the tax giveaways for the super-rich with his on-going hectoring about deficits, I thought I would mosey over to look at the response to the issue by another Missouri GOP favorite, Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-9).  And guess what I found out? Good old, by-by-the-GOP-rule-book Blaine is hewing close to the Crossroads GPS strategy outlined earlier today – feign outrage and talk lots and lots about jobs, small businesses and the recession:

Today is a disappointing day for our job-creating small business owners, who are greatly affected by the job-killing tax increases that Democrats support, which will take effect in less than a month. Today’s job-destroying vote will continue to subject our small businesses to damaging tax hikes, which will only perpetuate the ongoing uncertainty that small business folks have been dealing with for months. My pledge to the people of the 9th District was to oppose all tax increases and to cut spending during these tough economic times. …

Once again, loud and clear – Blaine Luetkemeyer voted for tax increases for 98% of the American taxpayers, and his “pledge” to oppose “all” tax increases amounts to a willingness to sacrifice that 98% for the sake of those with enough of the green to fork over the big campaign moolah. Nothing more, nothing less.

But Luetkemeyer is right in line with the recommendations suggested by Glen Bolger in a Crossroad GSP GPS funded report on how to obfuscate those facts: Pretend, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that the tax giveaways for the wealthy would affect a majority of small businesses, and that they could have more than a minimal stimulative effect in general. He also deftly uses Bolger’s suggested ploy of conflating the tax giveaways for the wealthy with the middle class tax cuts put forward by the Democrats, creating an image of himself as a fighter for equal treatment for all, even those who have had an unequal advantage for the past eight years at least.

Just in case anyone’s inclined to take the equality bait, it is useful to look at this chart (source: The Joint Committee on Taxation, via Ezra Klein) that shows just how unequal the middle tax cuts vs. the wealthy tax giveways really are:

Somehow makes Luetkemeyer’s (and Akin’s) rhetoric about about extending the tax cuts for all “equally” seem just a little hollow.

There’s an opening for a new “Young Gun,” the not-so-very-young pols whom the Republican National Congressional Committee is grooming to be the “future leaders of America.” The Young Guns program lost a promising member last week when it was disclosed that Rich Iott, the GOPer running against Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, likes to dress up like a Nazi as part of his membership in the 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division, a group of Ohio World War II reenactors with a difference:

According to their website, the Wikings strive to “salute” the “idealists” from occupied northern Europe who saw the Third Reich as “the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life” and signed up to fight for the Wermacht and “gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free.

While the RNCC doesn’t really seem to care so much about just how right their right wingers are (the righter the better seems to be the case), they do shy away from a such a glaringly public association with the actual prototypes of racist murderers, hence the opening. And prominent on their Young Guns Webpages, as a “contender” for Young Gun status, is none other than Missouri’s own Ed Martin, Russ Carnahan’s Tea Party opponent for the 3rd district House seat.

So what would Martin’s selection as a Young Gunner mean – besides getting lots of money? Simply that the RNCC thinks he has a realistic chance of winning his race and getting into congress where he could support the Young Guns agenda.

And what is that agenda? Just consider that  Young Guns is the title of a book by Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy, the avant garde of retrograde GOPism. They like to think of themselves as not belonging to “your grandfather’s Republican party.” And they’re right. My grandfather’s Republican party was the party of moderate Nelson Rockefeller – they are more like my great, great grandfather’s Republican party, the one owned by John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt during the Gilded Age. Not a really nice time for the working man or the tiny middle class of the period as I recollect.

This Americans United video may be satirical, but it’s on the money in its depiction of the exemplary young guns and their targets:

Apart from the original young guns spurious intellectual aspirations, Ed Martin should fit right in. He has, after all, already tweeted his allegiance to Ryan’s “Road Map for America’s Future” which aims to slash entitlement programs as part of dismantling the entire government, although, sly boots that he is, he is careful to run for cover when directly confronted with his support for the agenda that dare not say its name. As SMP blogger Hotflash puts it:

True, Ed Martin is not on record ever having uttered the words, “I support privatization of Social Security,” but unless he didn’t know even the most basic information about the Ryan plan, he implicitly stood in favor of privatization.

Only lately has Martin started acting as if he hadn’t noticed that little privatization thingie in the Ryan plan. But he is, at least, very sure where he stands now–in the only safe spot for a candidate with a prayer of getting elected.

Of course, it is where they stand after they get elected that defines members of the party of the Big Lie.

Have you noticed how the GOP is exploiting the jobs issue – the problem they caused – as a club to fight off everything that worries their corporate friends no matter how weak the connection? Roy Blunt is no exception. Section 6 of his six point jobs creation plan offers this little favor for his long-time pals and clients of his lobbyist son in the telecommunications industry.

FCC Regulation of the Internet – Over the past two decades, the country’s telecommunications providers have taken advantage of a light regulatory environment to invest in and expand access to wide varieties of high-speed communications.  Unfortunately certain voices within the Democrat-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are determined to impose sweeping government regulations on the Internet. This will result in slower investment and innovation in this critical industry and fewer jobs of all levels.

What Blunt is talking about here is net neutrality – as in killing net neutrality, which is something that the big telecoms and Internet Service providers (ISPs) really, really want their pet politicians to do. If you’re not up on what net neutrality is and why it is important, take a look at this brief video:

Currently, as Blunt indicates, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering new rules that would preserve net neutrality.  In response, the ISPs recently debuted the “net neutrality will cost jobs” line of attack, and Blunt, like a good little toady, is simply parroting the industry line.  

Prior to launching their attack, the industry commissioned several “studies” that attempt to show a connection between job loss and the FCC’s proposed rules. Needless to say, none of the studies stand up to serious scrutiny, nor do they need to do so to serve their purpose. They are intended to bamboozle poorly informed but well-intentioned politicians like Missouri’s Russ Carnahan, Lacy Clay, and Emanuel Cleaver while providing some media talking points for the Blunts of the world, a way to muddy the waters in discussions where real scrutiny is almost always lacking.

At first glance, the three most ballyhooed studies seem to be issued by reputable sources, the New York Law School’s Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute, the DLC affiliated Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), and by George Brazalon of the Brattle group. One should not, however, be deceived by appearances. PPI receives much of its funding from AT&T and the Bradly Group, which Timothy Karr describes as “a right-wing cabal  of anti-Neutrality groups.” The other studies were commissined and paid for by the telecoms, and, in the first case, co-authored by a known industry stooge, Bret Swanson, characterized by Techdirt as “AT&T’s go to guy for pure anti-net neutrality propaganda,” who “seems to relish in totally making stuff up.”

For what it’s worth in these days of “truthiness,” these studies have all been widely debunked in terms that ought to leave those responsible writhing in shame – if they were capable of shame, that is. For example, in the report cited above by Bret Swanson, mentined above, has:

… used completely bogus “science” to insist that network neutrality rules would result in 1.5 million job losses. He came to that number simply by adding up all of the people employed by companies that submitted comments to the FCC opposing network neutrality (seriously).

So much for net neutrality as a killer of jobs. In fact, as Karr points out, the ISPs have been busy cutting jobs for some time – a trend that will continue no matter what:

PPI’s report assumes that if the FCC has basic oversight authority, it will lead to bad outcomes. But history tells a different story. When the Bell companies were subject to the full weight of Title II, they increased employment by 15 percent, according to their own SEC filings. But once the FCC began dismantling these pro-competitive rules through massive deregulation, these companies shed nearly 40 percent of their work force, even as their revenues increased and profits soared.

AT&T and Verizon alone are responsible for tens of thousands of layoffs over the last two years. Verizon is accelerating its layoffs, while AT&T laid off 12,000 workers through 2009 and thousands more in 2010.

“Sadly, this pattern of ISPs destroying good jobs while reaping higher profits will likely continue with or without reclassification and Net Neutrality,” Turner says.

Of course, you can bet good ole Roy won’t talk about this predatory, job-killing corporate behavior, but  will, instead, whenever necessary, pull out the “research” that shows that preserving the Internet for all of us will cost jobs. After all, the job that he is worried about the most is his own – and AT&T and, over the years, the Baby Bells have done him and his very good indeed in that respect.

Giggle inducing title of a new press release from the ever-clueless Todd Akin (R-2nd): “Congressman Akin Condemns Democrats Refusal to Govern.” Pretty rich coming from a charter member of the Party of No, No way, Never, Unh-uh.

What Akin is talking about is the House leadership’s decision not to pass a budget blueprint this year.  According to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer:

It isn’t possible to debate and pass a realistic, long-term budget until we’ve considered the bipartisan commission’s deficit-reduction plan, which is expected in December …

Instead:

The House will put forth a “budget enforcement resolution” rather than a budget blueprint that looks beyond next year and calculates five or 10 years’ worth of deficit figures.

The House’s “enforcement” – or deeming – resolution will endorse the goals of the president’s fiscal commission and reiterate the commitment to vote on its recommendations after the midterm elections. And it will also set limits on discretionary spending “that require further cuts below the president’s budget, …

Not too unreasonable given all the deficit Sturm und Drang Republicans are drumming up and the resulting stampede of ConservaDems. It certainly doesn’t sound like refusing to govern. That’s what occurs when all members of a political party move in lock-step, for purely political reasons, to obstruct vital legislation and hold-up even minor government appointments – and we all know who’s been doing just these things, Rep. Akin.

Actually, insofar as Hoyer seems to be taking a rational approach to the issue of deficits, it might even be heartening news. Hoyer, unlike Missouri’s would be deficit mavin, Claire McCaskill, seems to be able to distinguish between short-term, stimulus related spending and long-term, structural budget deficits, cautioning against  “overreacting to short-term deficits while we’re still feeling the effects of recession.”

All well and good, I say – taken at face value, it sounds like responsible leaders taking into account the circumstances on the ground, and at the very least, it’s no big deal. But, of course, Rep. Akin doesn’t see it that way:

This decision sends a clear message to American families that Democrats in Washington still don’t understand the seriousness of our fiscal crisis and they still view working Americans as the ‘cash cow’ to fund their excesses.

What excesses? Massive tax cuts for the wealthy? Invading Iraq on trumped up reasons? Giveaways to the energy, banking, you-name-it industry? But wait – didn’t that happen while Akin and his pals were running the show?  

Maybe Republicans in Washington just like to throw temper tantrums to pass the time – it must get pretty boring doing pretty much nothing that really amounts to anything. To bad they’re doing it on our dime.

Despite the almost unthinkable damage caused by the gulf oil spill, the GOP really, really wants to stick up for their big oil pals. Why, after all, kill a cash cow – witness the hefty contributions from the energy sector to those who voted against climate change legislation in the House. To date, the GOP line has been subtle – if you overlook Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s almost comical reluctance to even admit that there is a problem. Now, however, a GOP party line, another variation on drill, baby, drill, is beginning to emerge, one that will allow these patriots to stand up for their oil buddies while putting it to the Democrats in the best let-the-country-be-dammed GOP style.

Just today Think Progress reports that Louisiana’s David Vitter, who has profited very handsomely from his service to Big Oil, has gone on the attack on behalf of British Petroleum (PB) the industry, declaring that the current drilling hiatus “will cost us more jobs and economic devastation than the oil spill itself.” Not to be outdone, Missouri’s Roy Blunt, who has also enjoyed the beneficence of Big Oil, seems to be getting ready to wade out into the same oily waters, as indicated by his smug tweet earlier today:

WSJ reports Obama “facing rising anger on the Gulf Coast over the loss of jobs & income” from his drilling moratorium. http://bit.ly/9KOSFa

Nobody should be surprised that those in the gulf who depend on the oil industry for their livelihood are worried abut what stricter controls will mean. This concern is part-and-parcel of the entire ugly predicament. It is, nevertheless, still a fact that, as President Obama put it in the WSF article Blunt cites above, that the potential and actual environmental and economic harm caused by the unregulated monstrosity that the oil industry became under the Bush regime has to be contained:

What is clear is that the economic impact of this disaster is going to be substantial and it is going to be ongoing …

A repeat of the BP Deepwater Horizon spill would have grave economic consequences for regional commerce and do further damage to the environment

Is it too much to hope that, just once, when this country is faced with a disaster, that politicians like Blunt could put aside their money-grubbing gamesmanship and and try to make common cause with the folks in government who are adult enough to take on the heavy lifting? Why do we have to put up with smirking simpletons like Blunt – who doesn’t seem to be able to restrain his glee that there might be a way to twist the facts so that the suffering of millions in the gulf could mean a political setback for the rival team, not to mention providing a way to grease up the ol’ money-machine?

UPDATE: Another landlocked Republican comes out for more deep-water drilling – after pocketing big bunches of dirty oil money.

Photo of New Orleand BP protest from Infrogmation of New Orleans on Wikimedia Commons.

At a meeting with “local job creators” at Consolidated Machine and Welding in Hannibal, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-7th) spread a little of the usual Republican B.S. about the effects of the stimulus:

The selfishness of what the government is doing and realizing that it is wrong and unsustainable and probably in that order. Even if it was sustainable, it’s wrong to decide we’re going to spend whatever we want and we’re going to let someone else figure out how to pay …

Kind of incoherent, but I think I know what he’s trying to say – and what I want to know is why didn’t anybody tell Blunt that the stimulus is working? According to a recent article in the National Journal:

If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Thanks to the massive job losses of the Bush recession, we won’t be out of the woods for a long time, but a good case can be made that Pat Garofalo of Think Progress is justified in claiming that the continuing improvement “is a strong sign that the economic stimulus package passed last year is doing what it is supposed to.”

And guess what?  Garofalo adds that contrary to the standard Republican talking point when confronted with job growth statistics, most of the new jobs were not in the public, but in the private sector – an important indicator that the economy is turning around. In all, 523,000 new jobs have been added in the private sector in the first four months of 2010.

Even the slight uptick in unemployment to 9.9% is less disappointing than in the past since, according to White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer, “such a rise in the labor force often occurs in recoveries as workers who had dropped out of the labor force are drawn back in by improved employment opportunities.” Further reinforcing the meme of a recovering job market, The Wall Street Journal notes:

More U.S. workers quit their jobs than were laid off in March, the second month in a row this occurred and a sign of employees’ growing confidence that more positions are becoming available in a slowly recovering job market.

If Roy Blunt wants to keep on blathering abut the stimulus and the debt burden for future generations, somebody really ought to give him a few facts about the relationship between debt and economic growth. It’s simple really – if we create jobs now and grow the economy, there will be less debt for future generations, not more.

If all that was necessary for recovery was, in Roy’s words, for “government to step aside and let Main Street employers create the jobs that are needed most,” we wouldn’t be in the mess that we are in now – after all, it was eight years of laissez faire, hands-off, and every man for himself that got us into the mess we’re in in the first place – and all the desperate lies of sad, ideologically irrelevant pols like poor old Roy can’t really change that fact. The truth always comes out in the end.