In an effort to get herself out of the deep you know what Vicky Hartzler stepped in when she tried to fan the birtherism flames among her more receptive constituents, she resorted to what has become the standby of a GOP that wants to hide its real proclivities. She denied interest in anything less lofty than jobs. According to her press aide, Hartzler “is focused on job creation and the economy – not on the birth certificate controversy.”

My response to this? Well and good. Since Hartzler is focused like a laser on the economy, I will expect to hear her touting the President’s job creation record any day now. This chart tells us that it’s not been nearly as bad as she and her GOP pals keep trying to claim:

I see slow but relatively steady job growth. According to most economists, the first six months of Obama’s presidency reflects the mess he inherited from George Bush’s toxic mixture of trickle-down economics and deregulation, but with the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a., the stimulus, we began to see improvement that has continued, albeit slowly, to the present day. Since 2010, the private sector has added about 3.9 million jobs.

Here, however, is another relevant chart for Hartzler to chew on:

Seems like unemployment figures might have been even better were it not for the loss of public sector jobs. McClatchy reports that since 2010, some 485,000 government jobs have been cut. These job losses are directly attributable to the GOP’s hatchet job on the budget, both at the federal and state levels.

As far as I can remember, Vicky’s been all for the austerity budgets with their destructive cuts to federal spending and down,down, down on the stimulus.

Given these facts, I think I’d like Hartzler to stay focused on the President’s birth certificate and forget about the economy. She’ll probably do a lot less harm that way.  

Barbara Lach-Smith, in a Kansas City Star column titled “Memo to Mo. Lawmakers: City Voters Aren’t Stupid,” summarized the attitude of Missouri lawmakers in regard to Prop B, the puppy-mill proposition, in the following terms:

Urbanites should not interfere in rural business because they do not know much about it.

It strikes me that we have been accumulating a serious body of evidence that supports a revised form of that proposition, which is that Missouri’s GOP should not interfere in government because they obviously don’t know much about it – or much of anything else for that matter.

Consider a few of today’s heaping big doses of mean and stupid:

— Firedup! reports that Tea Party darling, State Rep. Paul Curtman, has introduced a bill that would save the state from the scourge of Sharia law that is threatening it – or not. Seems Curtman isn’t really sure what it is, apart from free-roaming bigotry, that necessitates this legislative effort. (You’ll remember Curtman from events during the Tea Party Summer of 2009, where his spirited effort to defend the Constitution from Obamacare proved that he also knows little about that document.)

— Lt. Governor Peter Kinder lauded the “firm, principaled leadership” of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, declaring that “a star is born.” Of course, given the results of recent polls, Walker may amount to no more than a shooting star, but then Kinder, who apparently believes that discretion is truly the better part of valor, has been known to reverse himself when necessary.  

— The Missouri House today held hearings on a bill that would “would require the Missouri Secretary of State to verify the citizenship of all presidential and vice presidential candidates appearing on the state’s ballots.” And here I thought Birtherism was yesterday’s fad.

— The Turner Report notes that freshman Rep. Vicky Hartzler is proud of GOP achievements in the House – which, according to her, seems to have consisted of story hour, where the constitution was read out loud, followed by play time, where Hartzler had “fun cutting spending.” Doesn’t it warm the cockles of your heart to learn how much little Vicky enjoyed slashing the social safety net and potentially destroying 700,000 jobs while she did it? Of course, Hartzler’s enjoyment might be due to the fact that her GOP pals were careful not to cut the farm subsidies that benefit Hartzler and other wealthy farmers.

— While we’re on the topic of Hartzler, it seems that she recently declared that Planned Parenthood “does not care about young women. They’re all about profit.” I would hazard a guess that Planned Parenthood’s profits might come as a surprise to the IRS.

This is just some of what I turned up after a quick and dirty survey of local blogs and papers. I did find plenty of stuff, though, that suggests a corollary to the axiom I proposed above: Given the lax campaign finance laws in the state, the grown-up members of Missouri’s  GOP only interfere in government when their wealthy business clients pay them to do so. But that’s a topic for another day since it requires massively more space.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.