Bush’s deficits are Clinton’s fault, too

October 28, 2006

I recently saw someone joke about how best to blame Clinton for all of Bush’s mistakes, but when they got to the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history, after Clinton had left Bush the biggest budget surpluses in U.S. history, the joke stumbled. No serious person could come up with any way to blame the deficit of Bush’s predecessor.

Then again, Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), has never been considered a serious person.

“The deficit is actually a result of a recession that began in his administration. We are exponentially paying down the deficit in an accelerated time frame.”

Putting aside the fact that far too many Republicans seem to have an almost pathological tendency to blame literally every domestic and international challenge on Clinton, no matter how well he handled the issue, Sweeney’s public comments reflect a truly bizarre connection to reality. None of his words make any sense. Trying to understand how a member of Congress thinks a temporary slow-down six years ago caused this year’s quarter-trillion dollar deficit is incomprehensible. For that matter, there’s no such thing as “exponentially paying down the deficit.” We can pay down the debt — indeed, Bush promised to in 2001 — but we’re not doing that either.

I’m reminded of something Charles Pierce wrote this week in an entirely different context.

It is devoutly to be hoped that, if it does nothing else, a Democratic sweep in the upcoming elections might disenthrall the Republicans from the notion that they can collect anyone off the steam-grates of their party’s boulevards, dress them up, and throw them out there to plague and pester the rest of us. Among its other effects, the “Gingrich Revolution” created a framework in which an incredible passel of fools, lightweights, mountebanks, kinky libertines, and public omadhauns managed to get themselves elected to Congress.

It’s a paragraph that applies to so many GOP incumbents….

As someone else said earlier about Pierce’s beautiful bit of phrase-turning, “It’s writing like that that makes me proud to be a Democrat.” Indeed Pierce is the best reason to read Tapped, just to get his daily bons mots.

That said, as a writer and professional user of words, I am ashamed to admit I don’t know this, but could someone tell us what a “public omadhuan” is? None of my friends know either, and they’re pretty smart folks. It’s pretty sure to be something bad, and if we all get to know what it is, we can use it as a way of publicly identifying ourselves as “liberal elitsts who know the language” whenever we’re out among the Unwashed, Illiterate Republican gangs.

Sweeney is just unbelievable – the guy is proof of where all the English slurs against the Irish ever came from.

  • The Republicans blaming Clinton reminds me of middle aged friends who blame their problems on their parents. Isn’t there a statute of limitations on blame? The Republicans have made not accepting responsibility and blaming others into a party platform.

  • of course in GOP Bizarro world we’re supposed to forget that Bush based a good part of his campaign in 1999-2000 on tax cuts – long before we had a recession – which started, by the way, AFTER Bush became President.

    Sweeney is actually going for a two-fer in the blatant lies department.

  • just to provide the facts: a recession constitutes two quarters of “negative” growth. those 2 quarters were Q2 and Q3, 2001. it is also true that we had negative growth in Q4, 2000, but then we had positive growth in Q1, 2001.

    so the recession did, of course, occur during bush’s term, although if we’re simply talking as adults, recessions are part of the ecology of capitalism, as necessary as forest fires, which they resemble in the sense that their role is to wipe out the excesses of the previous growth.

    amusingly, many members of the gop, when they aren’t blaming clinton for the recession, claim that 9/11 caused it! this means that the impact off 9/11 was, economically, a matter of 19 days, since the recession ended on 9/30/01.

    on the serious side, here we are, 20 quarters into growth, and we still have enormous budget deficits (it’s, of course, utterly dishonest, meaning typical for the bush white house, to pretend that we’ve made progress on reducing the deficit because of the prepayment of social security taxes given that the administration is engaged in stealing those). right-wingers regard that as some sort of good sign….

  • Among its other effects, the “Gingrich Revolution” created a framework in which an incredible passel of fools, lightweights, mountebanks, kinky libertines, and public omadhauns managed to get themselves elected to Congress.

    No shit- it’s as if someone opened up a few high school detentions and let them out into the halls of power.

  • Tom, I too must confess ignorance concerning the meaning of “public omadhauns”. I have searched the Free Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary and the Online OED. I came up with nothing. It could be either a literary allusion or a non-English word, but for me it doesn’t even ring the faintest of bells.

  • Tom, a Google search has turned up the following passage a in Celtic fairy tale, “The Story of the McAndrew Family“,

    McAndrew was a lucky man, the neighbours all said; but as for himself; when he looked on his seven big sons growing up like weeds and with scarcely any more sense, he felt sore enough, for of all the stupid omadhauns the seven McAndrew brothers were the stupidest.

    It turns out that James Joyce has also use the term in his novel the Dubliners. Here is the context.

    said: -It is supposed-they say, you know-to take place in the depot where they get these thundering big country fellows, omadhauns, you know, to drill. …”

    And here is the definition from the back matter of the book.
    125.22 country bumpkins: `awkward country fellows, louts’ (SOED). 125.24 bostoons: Gaelic bastn: `blockhead, bounder’ (O Hehir). 12535 omadhauns: Gaelic amaddn: `fool’ (O Hehir). 126. …”

    In terms that your average American would understand we are talking Jethro Bodine.
    Your humble researcher, Rege

  • I suspect we’ll be blaming George Bush for our problems for a long long time. And rightly so.

    As I recall, when Bush was campaigning in 2000 he was trying to hurt Gore by talking down the economy. He damaged economic confidence at a crucial time.

  • In other James Joyce news:

    A few replacements for “at the end of the day”

    the holy alls of it—(slang) the long and the short of it.
    wash the pot—(slang) to confess one’s sins.
    up to the knocker—up to snuff; passable.
    a sod of turf under his oxter—that is, each student was expected to help heat the school by bringing fuel. In Ireland, turf was burned to provide heat; “oxter” is slang for armpit.

    References to Gibbons, Delay and Foley
    peloothered—(Irish slang) drunk.
    bostoons—(Irish) rogues.
    lay-brother—in this case, an usher in a church.

    Sounds like a scene from a Lynne Cheney novel:
    quincunx—an arrangement of five objects in a square, with one at each corner and one in the middle.

  • Let’s not forget that the economic growth during the 1990s was due to Reagan’s policies. Except for that little recession-thing during the early 1990s.

    That was Carter’s fault

  • Dear Tom, rege, and fellow CB bloggers: Concerning the meaning of “public omadhauns,” as a freelance proofreader I subscribe to Merriam-Webster Unabridged Online and looked up “omadhaun” as the core word and found it listed: omadhaun is a noun whose etymology (or derivation) is Irish Gaelic’s “amadan” and “chiefly Irish,” and means “fool, idiot, simpleton.” In other words, Charles Pierce in mentioning “public omadhauns, ” meant to imply that public elected officials were “fools, idiots, and simpletons.”

    Hope this helps. Let’s hope that our fellow Americans join us in replacing the callous Republicans now in power with caring, responsive, and responsible Democrats this November 7th. Restore true democracy to our shores.

  • I hate stupid Democrats. Oh wait, ‘stupid democrat’ is redundant.

    The reason we had the great economy of the 90’s is due to the great President’s tax and fiscal policy from 1981 through 1989.

    The reason we had a lousy economy since 2001 is due to the impeached President’s tax and fiscal policy from 1993 to 2001.

    Come on….

    Don’t you remember Senator Dole and Congressman Gingrich, along with a lot of other smart Republicans, said that the Clinton tax policy would lead to a recession and record deficits?

    Taxes were raised in the early 90’s and the recession came about 10 years later.

    However, the Bush tax cuts took place in 2003 and the economy immediately improved. If y’all weren’t so stupid you would realize that the tax cuts signed in 2001 didn’t take effect until 2003 when the economy improved.

    If you don’t understand any of this then you haven’t watched Fox News enough.

  • Deficits? Large deficits is the problem in recent years? Could that have something to do with Bush’s over-the-top, skewed-to-benefit-the-wealthiest-Americans tax cuts? Hmmm?

  • I’ve recently read in the MSM that due to the increas in tax revenues collected so far this year, the federal deficit has been halved. Gee, now how can tax revenue be increased when the tax rates were decreased?Most of the increased revenues are coming from the taxpayers with higher incomes.

  • “so the recession did, of course, occur during bush’s term, although if we’re simply talking as adults, recessions are part of the ecology of capitalism, as necessary as forest fires, which they resemble in the sense that their role is to wipe out the excesses of the previous growth.” – Howard

    But the truth of the business cycle is that we are supposed to bounce out of recessions with very strong growth. Sadly, we have not seen such growth. Job growth has not stayed high enough to absorb the 150,000 new American workers that should be added to the workforce every month. In fact, an analysis of the growth of the work force since Boy George II took office showed that the increase of the workforce has come primarily from immigrants, legal and illegal, and the 2,900,000 new American-born males who should have joined the workforce have either stayed out, or simply been replacing other adult males who have left the workforce early. In short, other than a couple hundred thousand women joining the workforce, BG2 has done nothing for us.

    “I’ve recently read in the MSM that due to the increas in tax revenues collected so far this year, the federal deficit has been halved. Gee, now how can tax revenue be increased when the tax rates were decreased?Most of the increased revenues are coming from the taxpayers with higher incomes.” – Fallenwoman

    Really? I’ve heard that most of the revenue has come from record corporate profits or from one time capital gains from millionaires that will not be collected in the following years, and that every analysis shows the deficit growing in future years if we don’t change the tax code.

    And a quarter of a trillion dollars in debt is still a quarter of a trillion dollars in debt. Clinton left us surpluses for years. BG2 blew those away, and he has a $1,500,000,000 war to pay for. How’s he going to do that exactly?

  • Lance, of course you’re right. the bush administration has presided over the weakest recovery of the post-world war ii period.

    as for fallenwoman and lance, both are correct: high-income earners have, of course, done very well under bush and so the personal income tax dollars colleced from high-income earners is up, but yes, we’ve also had various short-term, non-repeatable corporate upsurges in tax payment, and even more important, yes, the deficit picture is awful going forward.

    and no, fallenwoman, anyone who tells you that they’ve cut the deficit in half is swallowing a bush lie, whereby a projected-high-deliberately-by-the-bush-administration deficit is set as the marker.

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