RNC chairman blames debt on 9/11

November 1, 2007

Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan was on CNN yesterday, explaining how confident he is that the GOP is going to do really well in next year’s election cycle. “I’ve been in 27 states so far, and I’m seeing a great enthusiasm,” Duncan said. “And after last night, my phone rang off the hook today with calls about the Democrat [sic] debate.” (Yes, the RNC is always on-message, even when it comes to bad grammar.)

Wolf Blitzer noted that Republicans are now emphasizing fiscal restraint as a party priority, and brought up some recent history to put this to the test. (via Tim Grieve)

BLITZER: Let’s talk about what some Republicans say happened during the first six, 6 1/2 years of the Bush administration, the six years when there was a Republican in the White House and the Republicans had the majority in the House and Senate.

And I’ll put some numbers up. The national debt when the president took office was $5.8 trillion, but now it’s gone up. It’s almost doubled, at least to $9 trillion. And this is money that our children and grandchildren are going to be owing to the Chinese, the Saudis, all the wealthy states out there who are taking these loans from the United States.

What happened to the fiscal conservatives that were so important to the Republican base?

DUNCAN: Wolf, I could get into a long explanation about the percentages and why we actually are bringing down the debt and over the next five years what’s going to happen, but the bottom line is what other president has faced a calamity like 9/11?

First, no one, not even the most hackish loyal Bushie in the West Wing, claims that the debt is going to come down “over the next five years.” These guys claim Bush can bring down the deficit by 2012, but until then, the enormous debt will just keep getting bigger. The chairman of the Republican National Committee apparently doesn’t know what the “debt” is. Actually, that tells us a lot about the modern GOP.

Second, 9/11? Really? Terrorist attacks six years ago added nearly $4 trillion to the national debt? That’s the RNC’s argument?

As it turns out, the RNC chairman wanted to pretend that the last six years didn’t really happen at all.

BLITZER: But — but the point is that, when the president had a Republican majority in the House and Senate, he got all these bloated appropriations bills, never vetoed any of them, even though there were a lot more appropriations, pork barrel spending, money going for all sorts of projects that he himself wanted. And all of a sudden the Democrats are now in the majority, and he’s discovered his veto pen.

DUNCAN: Well, the Democrats are in the majority, and they can’t deliver him tax bills. I mean, let’s talk about the fact that they’ve not — what their responsibility to give budget bills to the president, they’ve not been able to do that, because they want to argue over who’s going to raise the taxes the most.

BLITZER: Why didn’t he veto some of those outrageous appropriations bills? Even a lot of Republicans say the spending was out of control when the Republicans controlled the House and Senate for six years.

DUNCAN: Well, we were experiencing the growth in the economy.

Bush became the biggest White House spender since LBJ because we were “experiencing the growth in the economy”? If I didn’t know better, I’d say the chairman of the Republican National Committee suggested on national television that increased government spending helps increase economic growth. (Robert Reich would be so proud of how far the RNC has come….)

Duncan concluded that Republicans’ reckless fiscal policies are justified because the result is what matters — he said we’re “making progress” and “giving hope to the American people.”

Duncan might want to talk to a few more Americans about just how much “hope” they really have.

Let me be succinct: if the Repubs could get away with (1) Florida and (2) swiftboating Kerry and arguably (3) Ohio, then, with all due respect, what makes anyone think that the mere repitition of lies will stop during the campaign season. For the lawyers among you, the best example are discovery disputes in litigation. In my experience, there is little doubt that in the vast majority of cases one of the parites is far more at fault than the other. Yet, judges do not want to address the merits and simply put a pox on both houses thereby encouraging future violations because (AND HERE IS THE RUPUBLICAN MANTRA) it is always better to the aggressor because you will be screwed less in the end. It is that simple, break the ruls, the judge slaps both wrists. Break the rules, and the press points out that both sides do it. I see no reason for any of that to change now.

  • Mike Duncan surpasses Biden’s description of Rudy because Duncan’s speech is a noun, a verb, 9/11 and a lie.

  • I haven’t seen so many cliches in one place since I had to sit through that awful “Independence Day” movie.

    The whole urban legend about how the Bush Administration is going to create their own reality, and will continue to create newer, different realities while we – judiciously, if you will – try to explain what they’re doing, is more apparent with each passing day.

  • I think it’s high time that our Acting President declared a Global War On 9/11 (G.W.O.N.E.) if Western Civilization is to survive.

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  • To give Duncan credit, I do have hope: I have hope that if the opposition is being run by morons like him that we can keep the WH and House and get filibuster-proof in the Senate.

    (And Eric, at 1, you have hit on one of my biggest pet peeves about judges in recent years – it hardly pays to do things right.)

    Terrorist attacks six years ago added nearly $4 trillion to the national debt? That’s the RNC’s argument?

    Sure – because in Rethug-logic, the terra-ist attacks six years ago required that we attack an unrelated country and overthrow its government, which is the real cause of the massive operating deficits under Bush.

    And what other President has faced a calamity like 9/11? Well – and I want to be clear I do not mean to belittle or demean 9/11 — Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman all faced much, much larger wars; Kennedy stared down nuclear annihilation, I’d say the first several Presidents, while the nation was still incipient and unsure faced bigger challenges. From a purely economic standpoint, the OPEC oil embargo against the US in the 70s was more significant.

    And of course it is ethnocentric to only consider our own country, anyway: leaders of every country in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, much of Africa, the Balkans, Ireland, Spain, many of the former Soviet states have for years had their own “9/11s” (in scale to their own populations) over and over and over again from terrorism, civil war, insurgency, etc. In the grand scheme of things, Americans have been very, very fortunate to have as few acts of large scale or terroristic violence to contend with over our 200 year history; a great many countries have had it much, much worse.

    Short version: Duncan is, to repeat, a moron.

  • But they didn’t have two 110-story steel-framed skyscrapers and one 47-story steel-framed skyscraper collapse nearly symmetrically at near free-fall speed, now did they Zeitgeist?

  • “DUNCAN: Wolf, I could get into a long explanation about the percentages and why we actually are bringing down the debt and over the next five years what’s going to happen, but the bottom line is what other president has faced a calamity like 9/11?”

    It doesn’t take too much searching to illustrate how unjustified this statement is. If you look at a plot of the U.S. public debt history , there are some clear understandable ‘calamitous’ spikes, most notably WWII, WWI, and the Civil War. Only WWII beats our current public debt/GDP percentage, though. Other ‘calamities’, such as the Korean War (50K dead?) and the Vietman War (58K dead) hardly register at all. A more suggestive image shows the recent debt history and the presidential correlation. It seems that shoddy ‘supply side’ conservatism is a better predictor than any U.S. turmoil.

  • All I can say is it’s too bad Little Wolfie didn’t grow some testicles a few years back.

  • Zeitgeist wrote: “I’d say the first several Presidents, while the nation was still incipient and unsure faced bigger challenges. ”

    Indeed. We were faced with ‘terrorism’ from the moment we became a free nation, in the form of piracy from Morocco and Algeria . We started with no navy, no international influence, and no fixed government to speak of. Americans were held as slaves in Algeria. In the end, we managed to come out victorious and gain all three.

    It’s another interesting contrast to Bush: with control of the most powerful, wealthy, influential nation in the world, he managed to void all three advantages in the course of six painful years.

  • Reality is an unknown concept to the republicans. Denial is the name of the game next to blame damage. What was Wolf to say, “You’re lying about everything. No wonder you guys want to govern in complete secret”.

  • What was Wolf to say, “You’re lying about everything. No wonder you guys want to govern in complete secret”.

    Is that really too much to ask?

  • You’ve gotta get a laugh out of these extremists who started crawling out from under the rocks during the Goldwater and Nixon eras. When they start endlessly offering five-year plans, “we actually are bringing down the debt and over the next five years,” they sound rather like those awful, awful commies that they detested so much.


  • bjobotts: What was Wolf to say, “You’re lying about everything. No wonder you guys want to govern in complete secret”.


    Zeitgeist: Is that really too much to ask?

    Just imagine if a major news personality would just come out and say it… “I think you’re all a bunch of lying thugs”. Things would turn around very, very quickly once the gasping and fainting settled down and dialog began about whether there might be some merit to that journalist’s “outrageous” statements.

    It truly is the media’s fault.

  • Yes indeed, it would be very nice if any of the TV personalities had the nerve to call their bluff and put them on the spot, right there.

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