Deceivers At Work

A while back I wrote about Republican efforts to censor certain words from the report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. No important ones, of course, just ones like "derivatives," "deregulation," "Wall Street," "shadow banking," "interconnection."

They're at it again. Let's hear from Bruce Bartlett, often mentioned here, former senior economic advisor to R. Reagan and GHW Bush, staff member of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp. (Yes, PT, your hero Ron Paul.) The man's not exactly a flaming liberal, one might infer. He's discussing recent legislation passed by the teabaggR House of Representatives that would force the CBO to spread falsehoods about Republican economic policy, and, like any remaining conservative with a couple of cerebral neurons to rub together (I know they're out there), he doesn't much like it.

The House of Representatives voted last week to tilt the budgetary process in favor of the Republican economic agenda. On Feb. 3, the House passed H.R. 3582, the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012. Innocuous on the surface, its long-term purpose is to institutionalize Republican economic policy into the very fabric of budgetary analysis.

[...]

... Republicans talk as if ... every tax cut will pay for itself and no tax increase could possibly ever raise net revenue and thus reduce the deficit....

[...]

Contrary to liberal mythology, the Reagan administration never asserted that the 1981 tax cut would come anywhere close to paying for itself. ... Nor did the George W. Bush administration ever assert that any of its tax cuts would pay for themselves. Yet Republican leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky continually assert that they did, in fact, pay for themselves and had no impact on the deficit.

A careful study by the C.B.O., however, found that the Bush tax cuts reduced revenues by $3 trillion through 2011, adding that much to the national debt.

As the budget deficit increasingly inhibits Republicans’ tax-cutting, they are planning ahead for tax cuts that they will insist are costless because they will so massively increase growth. But for that approach to work, the C.B.O. and the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official budget and tax estimators, need to be forced to play along.

That’s what the new legislation is all about.

[...]

As I have previously noted, this fits into a pattern – since getting control of Congress in 1995, Republicans have often abolished institutions that they couldn’t turn into puppet organizations for promoting their agenda.

[...]

... Implicitly, Republicans want everyone to think that spending never raises growth because it’s their dogma.

But in the real world, everyone knows that government investments in the national highway system, medical and other scientific research, and other programs unquestionably add to growth. ...

It is reasonable to assume that the Republicans’ effort to alter the budget process is just another aspect of their goal to politicize policy and institutionalize their philosophy.

(yeah, yeah, the bolding is mine. And you should read the whole essay.)

So there you have it, not from me (although I've said as much about teabaggRs here countless times), but from a true conservative, as the term used to be applied: the current crop of Congressional Republicans are actively NOT interested in truth and are deliberately trying to deceive their willing and pre-deluded supporters.

I can't tell how likely it is that we'll have Rs in control of the White House and the Senate come January. But I can say with absolute certainty that if it comes to pass, it'll make the disasters wrought upon us by George Bush look like chocolate fountains and unicorns. Because this time around, with their dimwittery and dishonesty, their propagandified pairing of persiflage and puffery, mendacious misdirection, there'll be no effective counterweight to their disregard for truth and their undisguised intention to impose a pre-failed agenda for the benefit of the very few and the complete disregard for everyone else. And, most especially, for the future of our country. And they'll be doing it by adopting the very methods they claim to deplore: fascisim. For what else do you call government-sanctioned propagandizing, institutionalized lying to the populace, aggregating power by nonstop deception and suppression of truth?

I suppose I should tone down the hyperbole; and I would if I didn't think what I'm saying is absolutely true. So I'll keep saying it until the takeover is complete and disagreement will be outlawed, judges arrested gingrichianly: these are really bad people, they'll be end of democracy; and they've convinced a hell of a lot of people -- including some who've recently resumed commenting here -- that this is actually this.