Karl Rove, Revisionist-in-Chief

Re:  David Axelrod – What Karl Rove got wrong on the U.S. deficit – washingtonpost.com

For its Topic A feature last Sunday, The Post invited a panel of political operatives to offer their advice to the Democratic Party on strategy for 2010 [Sunday Opinion, Jan. 10]. Improbably, one of the operatives asked was Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s longtime chief strategist.

Of all the claims Rove made, one in particular caught my eye for its sheer audacity and shamelessness — that congressional Democrats “will run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years.”

So, let’s review a little history:

The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus — with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit — and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade. During eight years in office, the Bush administration passed two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, enacted a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and waged two wars, without paying for any of it.

To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush administration’s swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined. And its spending spree is the unwelcome gift that keeps on giving: Going forward, these unpaid-for policies will continue to add trillions to our deficit.

This fiscal irresponsibility — and a laissez-faire attitude toward the excesses of the financial industry — helped create the conditions for the deepest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. Economists across the political spectrum agreed that to deal with this crisis and avoid a second Great Depression, the government had to make significant investments to keep our economy going and shore up our financial system.

You lie!

Karl Rove is a liar! Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar! Pants on fire! Liar!!!!!!! LIAR!

There. Now. I got it out of my system. Bush always touted those tax cuts that he had to pass using the budget reconciliation process, a process that circumvents the filibuster, as something that would be good for all Americans. Guess what. It wasn’t. I paid more tax for 2008 than any year ever. My taxes steadily rose under Bush, but the wealthy saw huge tax savings. Cutting taxes for the wealthy was the single worst act by any President and did irreparable harm to our economy.

If any of you conservatives out there can name one thing – one – that GW Bush did that was good for America, I want to hear it. Please leave a comment.