"Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah - I Can't Hear You!"

The on-going Republican reaction to the crisis they helped bankers bring on us is nothing short of astounding. Denial, hypocrisy, lies - it's all there, like warts on a hog.

DENIAL

The same day we got hit with the news that unemployment is at an all-time modern high - 8.5% (half what it probably actually is) - No 2 House Pub Eric Cantor, the guy responsible for maintaining party discipline, decided that the crisis was being overblown by Democrats for political reasons. (Via Avedon) He begins by acknowledging what Rush Limbaugh has been saying about how he - Rush - is the GOP leader now.

As far as Rush, Rush has got ideas. He's got following. He believes in the conservative principles that many of us believe in - of lower taxes, of making sure that we turn back towards a focus on entrepreneurialism in this country, to promoting innovation and not stamping that out by overreacting, if you will, which this town often does, to crisis...

IOW, "Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. The crisis doesn't really exist and even if it did, that's no reason to raise my taxes or the taxes of my rich contributors."

Uh-huh.

HYPOCRISY

Meanwhile, Bobby Jindal's Louisiana is doing better than many other states precisely because of a massive stimulus package even as Jindal is gathering Limbo/wingnut support for a 2012 presidential bid by "threatening" to reject the new stimulus money.

Years before Washington spent $787 billion on a national stimulus bill, it staged an unintended trial run in Louisiana, a huge injection of some $51 billion for which historians find few, if any, precedents in  single state.

The experiment is still playing out, but some indicators suggest that what occurred in Louisiana — dumping a large amount of reconstruction money into a confined space in the three and a half years since Hurricane Katrina — has had a positive outcome. The state’s unemployment rate of 5.7 percent in February was considerably below the national average of 8.1 percent, and it was the only state to see a drop in unemployment from December to January. It was also the only state with an increase in non-farm employment in February.

State economists specifically mention what one called “the ongoing building boom” from federal dollars as a main reason for the numbers. Largely a result of the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, construction projects have not dried up as they have elsewhere, and a few can even be seen in downtown New Orleans.

Construction has “really hung in there and done very well,” said Loren Scott, an emeritus professor of economics at Louisiana State University. “In most states construction is way down, but in ours it has been up.” The relatively low unemployment rate in Louisiana “tells you that the stimulus can have an effect,” Mr. Scott said.

However, the state’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, has positioned himself as a leading voice against the new stimulus bill, objecting to federal intervention in a state’s economy. He has threatened to reject $98 million in stimulus money intended to help Louisiana’s unemployed, echoing other Southern and Western governors who have turned such rejections into a conservative rallying cry.

But even as Mr. Jindal has criticized the stimulus bill, his own subordinates have continued to request money from Washington, notably in replacing Charity Hospital, which for generations served the poor in downtown New Orleans. State health officials, disregarding restoration work at Charity done in the months immediately after Hurricane Katrina, say they need a brand-new hospital and an additional $500 million; the Federal Emergency Management Agency has balked and is offering only $150 million.

This is called "cognitive dissonance" or "hyper-hypocritical extortion" or, more colloquially, the "Who Me?" Gambit, wherein you declare you're above such petty, small-minded things as taking taxpayer money even as you strip said taxpayer of every penny he has.

Denying that you're taking my money when you're emptying my wallet right in front of me may not be the smartest political move in the world, Bobby, but it's somewhat less self-destructively dumb than standing in the public square in front of people who need help and ignoring them to fight for people who don't.

I don't think I have to ask how that shit is playing on Main Street.

CLUELESS CRONYISM

The NYT notes this week that two well-known GOP Senator-type peabrain wingnuts took to the floor to excoriate Obama's economic plan because it was aimed at the wrong people.

The Senate budget debate began this week against a backdrop of war and recession, rising unemployment and surging foreclosures, runaway health care costs and diminishing insurance coverage — to name just a few of the nation’s big problems. But for Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, and Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, the most pressing issue is clear: America’s wealthiest families need help. Now.

Well, OK, so Lincoln is a Democrat. She's a Blue Dog and they now count as part of the GOP. WTH, they vote with em all the time, have the same ideas, use the same TP's, etc. We have a committee working on trying to uncover any actual differences between BD's and real Dems but after 7 weeks of investigations they are still unable to come up with one.

We're still working on it though, and we're going to find one if it kills us. Or you.