Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was on WTOP this morning, taking a break from blowing $200 million on a bypass Charlottesville doesn’t want & won’t solve traffic problems, to bravely armchair quarterback the DC debt ceiling negotiations.
While Gov. McDonnell spends plenty of time attacking President Obama, he has nothing but kind words for his “friend” Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), universally acknowledged as the person most responsible for the mess we’re in. And it’s not just Cantor’s reckless behavior this summer – he voted for every single unfunded spending measure & tax cut that created our current deficit:
[T]he speaker, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all voted for major drivers of the nation’s debt during the past decade: Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and Medicare prescription drug benefits. They also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that rescued financial institutions and the auto industry.
Steve Benen says, “It’d be amusing if it weren’t so ridiculous”:
Literally the exact same people whose fiscal irresponsibility created the deficit mess are the ones whining constantly about the problem they’re responsible for. Worse, they keep blaming everyone but themselves. Worse still, they’re prepared to crash the economy on purpose unless the solution to their own fiasco meets their approval.
This isn’t in the realm of spin or opinion. The numbers are unambiguous: Republicans took a large surplus, turned it into massive deficit. Republicans could have paid off the debt within a decade, but they instead chose to pursue an ambitious agenda without paying for it.
And now they don’t want the nation to pay the bills.
And if Gov. McDonnell cares so much about America’s credit rating, why is he supporting the Republican plan, which would result in a downgrade, over the Democratic plan, which would save our credit? Peter Galuszka wrote this yesterday at Bacon’s Rebellion (before McDonnell’s latest round of blaming Obama & exempting Cantor):
If McDonnell is worried about what Moody’s might do, he does have a remedy at hand, though. It’s simple. Call up his fellow Republican, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and tell him to stop acting like a spoiled kid and work for a bipartisan way out of the federal budget mess. It’s a win-win thing they both should understand.
Should understand. But if you take their words & actions at face value, quite clearly don’t understand.
Look, Gov. McDonnell is asking us to on the one hand believe he’s a pragmatic centrist who knows about jobs and making the economy work, and on the other hand demonstrating he has no problem holding America’s economy hostage to achieve Tea Party goals of destroying America’s social safety net. He can’t have it both ways.
Sign up for the Blue Virginia weekly newsletter
