Paul Krugman to Eric Can’tor: “Have you left no sense of decency?”

More reading for this morning: Paul Krugman’s New York Times Column on Eric Can’tor holding aid for victims of Hurricane Irene hostage, and more broadly on how Can’tor “has done more than anyone else to make policy blackmail – using innocent Americans as hostages – standard operating procedure for the G.O.P.”

As Krugman points out, Can’tor may be a “hard man,” “willing to endanger America’s financial credibility, putting our whole economy at risk” and also “threatening to take Irene’s victims hostage,” he’s also a Category 5 hypocrite. How so? Paul Krugman explains:

*Can’tor and his Republican fellow hypocrites “did nothing to offset the cost of the Iraq war, which now stands at $800 billion and counting.”

*In 2004, “when his home state of Virginia was struck by Tropical Storm Gaston, Mr. Cantor voted against a bill that would have required the same pay-as-you-go rule that he now advocates.”

I’d add that Can’tor and his Republican fellow hypocrites, people like George Allen for example, also voted time and again during the Bush Administration for tax and spending measures that first turned Bill Clinton’s “surpluses as far as the eye could see” into deficits, then turned those deficits into a gargantuan mess (President Obama inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit the day he became president.

Let me repeat that: Barack Obama INHERITED a $1.3 trillion deficit from Eric Can’tor, George W. Bush, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, etc..

Oh, and Obama also inherited an economy in a free-fall, already in a terrible recession and falling fast. Obama stopped the bleeding, and we’re slowly crawling back – in spite of the efforts of Can’tor and his fellow Republican’ts to make sure “Obama fails” – but it’s going to take time to get out of the mess Republican’t left us in. Don’t ever forget that.

Of course, Can’tor and Company are busy spreading their Big Lies, such as that President Obama and the Democrats (the party that left the country with a huge surplus when Bill Clinton exited office in January 2001), are somehow responsible for this situation. That’s not just a Big Lie, it’s downright crazy. Or, as Paul Krugman says, it’s part of Can’tor et al’s “extraordinary nihilism…their willingness to flout all the usual conventions of fair play and, well, decency in order to get what they want.”

Two final points by Krugman, which I’d like to emphasize. First, yet another Republican Big Lie to the contrary, America is NOT BROKE. In fact, as Krugman notes, we are “having no problem at all borrowing to pay for current expenses” and we are “able to borrow funds at extremely low interest rates.” That’s pretty much the opposite of “broke.” Second, although the Democrats are far from perfect – as Krugman points out, they “have their fair share of cynics and careerists” in their ranks – it’s only one part, the Republican Party, that’s led by someone with absolutely no sense of decency, no sense of public service, no sense of “tikkun olam” (I learned about that core concept in my Jewish education; somehow Can’tor slept through it), and ultimately on sense of decency, as Eric Can’tor. The question is, how long will America put up with this?