Like most good Americans, I've been struck with "Republican Convention Fever!" (for which the only cure is to drink an ice-cold pitcher of Mint Juleps and then to run down the highway dressed as Bigfoot), not missing a single moment of the excitement and drama as captured by The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, applauding my foresight in not taking out the cases of beer bottles so I don't even have to get up to go to the bathroom.
Unfortunately, I missed the part when two RNC shitbags threw nuts at an African-American CNN camera operator and said, "This is how we feed animals." I must have missed that episode because I was so busy listening for references to George W. Bush.
Other than that though, this year's RNC has been almost as fun as a box full of Purple Heart band-aids and I'm telling you, the bounce was starting to be felt in the seat of my La-Z-Boy, nearing Rich Lowry starbursts territory.
That is, until Ezra Klein left a twelve of Keystone Light in my convention beer cooler this morning.
(The beer's below the orange suds-looking thingy)
Although I've been trying to enjoy the pomp and stomp that only the madcap GOP can organize, wonks like Ezra Klein have left a big, smelly dump in my bowl of Ruffles. Captivated as I am by the way-cool "Debt Clock" that the Republicans are featuring at the convention (to show how Obama is running up the deficit), Klein tells us that:
(T)he idea is to blame President Obama and the Democrats for the national debt.
But in doing so, the Republicans will end up blaming Obama for the policies they pushed in the Bush years, and the recession that began on a Republican president's watch, and a continuation of tax cuts that they supported. They'll have to. Because if they took all that off the debt clock, there wouldn't be much debt there to blame him for at all.
To prove his point, Klein points to this graph
this graph from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
Totally killing all the fun I'd have been having watching the "Debt Clock" numbers spin away like cherries on a slot machine, Klein goes on to say,
If there'd been no Bush tax cuts, no wars, no financial crisis and everything else had been the same? Debt would be between 20 and 30 percent of GDP today, rather than almost 100 percent.
Having pulled away the debt football Lucy-like from the Charlie Browns down in Tampa, Klein moves on to knock over the "Obama-is-taxing-us-to-death!" bong that all the Gee Oh Pee-ers are smoking from. In another article, Klein asserts that no, taxes haven't been raised under Obama and that, just maybe,
the economy might be better off if he had raised them.
So far, it's been tax cuts, just like it was in the Bush era. If tax cuts were enough to assure growth, we should have seen a rocketing economy over the last decade. To put things delicately, we did not. Conversely, the Clinton era, which started with a big tax increase, featured a boom.
Well thanks, Ezra. How am I supposed to get all giddy with the red meat the Republicans are promising to throw my way when you ruin it all with facts, statistics and smarty-pants your know-it-all attitude?
Damn dude, you're like the guy who stops us right before we start launching bottle rockets out of our butts with, "Um... I don't think this is a great idea..."
My convention is ruined now. Nothing left to do but get drunk, put on my Ghillie suit and head out to the Seventeen.