Beard: The American slang term originally referred to anyone who acted on behalf of another, in any transaction, to conceal a person’s true identity. (Wikipedia)

In this case, the beard is, as the title states, Vicky Hartzler, and the identity she’s trying to conceal is that of the political party responsible for the failure to pass a farm bill filled with much needed disaster assistance for drought-devastated farmers. Miss Vicky was chosen to give the weekly Republican address (video at The Turner Report). Since her family runs a big farm in Missouri, the GOPers were probably sure that she would be a natural choice to help them wipe the egg that was the farm bill fail off their collective faces. Here’s what Miss Vicky had to say about the hard time ahead for our farmers:

Like you, I was relieved earlier this month when the House passed a bipartisan measure helping farmers devastated by the ongoing drought.  A lot was riding on this bill, but the Senate, a body controlled by the president’s party, left Washington for the month of August without even bringing it to a vote.   The president has seen fit to politicize this issue, but the fact is he didn’t urge the Senate to act.

That is a true shame.  Drought conditions continue to worsen, and the shaky state of the economy only amplifies our anxiety.

Well no, Vicky, your feelings about the House Farm Bill are demonstrably not at all like mine – or like most Americans who don’t grudge food to the hungry. Nor are your facts exactly correct.

The fact is the Senate acted. It passed a bill that House members refused to vote on because it gives too much in the way of food subsidies to poor Americans. The House, instead, attempted, in the last few hours of their session to pass a paltry stop-gap disaster-relief bill that many legislators, both Republican and Democratic, considered next to worthless, and jam it through the Senate without allowing for time to consider its provisions. The jokers that make up the House majority didn’t need to create this mess, but they have shown time after time that they will always put ideology above the welfare of Americans.

In this case, House leaders (John Boehner and GOP VP pick, Paul Ryan) were more than willing to bankrupt American farmers just to insure that people who are feeling the Bush recession the hardest don’t get any government-sponsored relief. Because, dontcha  know, government doesn’t know how to do it; if government does know how to do it, we shouldn’t let it because that’s  socialism and we’ll not be free anymore; the tiny fraction of our budget spent providing food aid to our poor will explode the deficit (although we love to explode it when it comes to unnecessary arms spending, unprovoked wars, oil subsidies and tax cuts for millionaires), and, finally, golly-gee, when it comes down to it, feeding our poor probably just isn’t in the Tea Party version of the constitution.

Believe it or not, there’re fools who buy this claptrap. And lots of them live in Missouri. At least some of them will be cheering Miss Vicky on. (For those who are, instead, embarrassed, and who live in her district, there’s an alternative – her name is Teresa Hensley, the Democratic Party candidate in the 4th Congressional District House race.)

Michael Tomasky wrote a piece last week abut why Republicans lie. The conclusion was pretty straightforward: they lie because the truth about their policies is so ugly. If they were to tell the truth about what their policies will do – and this pertains to the farm bill, jobs, and every other talking point Miss Vicky dredged up in her pedestrian effort to ring the various GOP-rigged Pavlovian bells – it would boil down to something like what Tomasky expresses in the following summary:

What we’re going to do here is make sure society’s very richest people have a lot more money. Our theory is they will spend it and that will help the whole economy. History hasn’t been kind to this idea, but it’s our theory and we’re sticking to it. These are the people who pay us to run, after all. Besides which, we really don’t like poor people; we think at bottom that it’s their fault they’re poor, so it doesn’t really matter to us whether anything trickles down to them.

As Tomasky adds: “That’s the truth. How would that sell?”

What is it about Republicans like Rep. Todd Akin (R-2)? Don’t they think any one is paying attention to what they say and do? According to PoliticMo, Akin not only rejected the President’s call to extend the payroll tax cut, but  called it “insane.”  Akin, who is on the record for opposing Social Security, seems to have nevertheless decided to resort to the GOP excuse du jour for raising middle class taxes and cried himself some primo crocodile tears about the supposed debilitating effect on Social Security posed by the tax cut extension:

We’ve made promises to people and they’re depending on this money coming in, and what is [President Obama] doing on a system that is already teetering? Well, he is going into the source of revenue – comes from the employers and employees,” […] “I think it is irresponsible.

Akin is, of course, fully aware that payroll tax cut extension now being debated would be paid for – the only bone of contention on that topic has been whether it should be paid for by a small surtax on millionaires, as Democrats propose, or by other means, such as the GOP proposal to cut federal workers’ pay. Further, as the New York Times‘ Andrew Rosenthal points out:

… even if the tax cut were not paid for – and the one currently in effect was not – it would still not affect Social Security. Federal law requires the treasury to reimburse any shortfall in the account used to pay retirement benefits . So while an unpaid-for payroll tax cut would raise the general deficit and lead to more borrowing, just like any other tax cut, it would not change Social Security benefits or damage the program’s future.

It’s telling when a politician has to depend on the ignorance of his constituents to justify his positions.

But that’s not the worst of it. Just two years ago, GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas proposed eliminating the payroll tax for a two month period. And guess which House member and current Missouri Senatorial candidate cosponsored the legislation? If you guessed Todd Akin you’d be dead on right.

As Sam Stein of the Huffington Post reports:

The political postures of Republican lawmakers have also changed. Today’s House GOP argues that a two-month holiday is a hard-to-implement Democratic ploy to put them in a compromising political position. The 2009 class saw actual economic benefits to keeping the payroll tax rates low — or, for a two-month time period, to eliminating them in their entirety.

“As you probably know, last month I proposed a two-month federal tax holiday that would serve as an alternative to the remainder of the bailout and more effectively stimulate our economy,” Gohmert said on January 6, 2009. “My bill would put the money back in the hands of the taxpayers who earned it by temporarily suspending individual income and FICA taxes for 2 months – meaning no taxes would be paid on those two months’ income.”

“Today I’ve reintroduced my two month tax holiday bill in the new Congress and updated the proposal to go into effect the first whole month following the bill’s passage,” Gohmert continued. “Therefore, as soon as this Congress’ Leadership allows a vote on the bill and it is signed into law, you will be able to hang on to more of your money, and we’ll see the American economy stimulated while keeping our strong democratic, free-market principles intact.”

So let’s see how many reversals is that. In 2009 Akin not only supported but cosponsored legislation to eliminate the payroll tax cut and seems to have believed that it would have a stimulative effect. He now denounces anything that sounds like stimulus. That’s two reversals. In 2009 he had no fear about harming Social Security with such a tax cut, although it gives him the tremors in 2011 – that’s three flip-flops. Now, if he adheres to the House’s new line that extending the payroll tax cut for only two months – as opposed to a full year – would create “uncertainty” for the “job-creators” (i.e. wealthy), or that it’s a cop-out by Democrats who just want to go on vacation, as the NRCC now desperately argues, that will be four unexplained about-faces from the very versatile Rep. Akin. And all of them to perpetrate what DCCC Chair Steve Israel has called “a middle class mugging of $1,000 from 160 million middle income Americans.”

* Next to last sentence edited for clarity: the phrase “for only two months – as opposed to a full year” was added.