Republicans Keep Getting the Facts Wrong

Reagan once said that "facts are stupid things" and this seems to be a rallying cry of conservatives in this election cycle. The latest parry in the hyperreal world conservatives continue to construct at their leisure is Santorum's claim that the recession was largely caused by increases in gas prices in 2008. First off, that is a ridiculous reinterpretation of the mortgage crisis and near Wall Street collapse the instigated the recession. Second, Obama didn't even become president to 2009, though Republican candidates like to ignore this fact. As CNN reported, Santorum claimed "We need to look at the situation with gas prices today. We went into a recession in 2008 because of gasoline prices. The bubble burst in housing because people couldn't pay their mortgages because they were looking at $4 a gallon gasoline." (CNN) Santorum blamed Obama for allowing gas prices to again rise by not exploiting domestic energy sources, creating a dubious connection to 2008. He later backtracked, claiming he should be "more specific" when making these claims.

This came a day after Santorum claimed that President Kennedy's call for a complete separation between church and state "makes [him] want to throw up" and Romney said that he wants to reduce taxes 20% on the rich and that he was like Detroit auto workers because his wife owns a few Cadillacs. This sort of tone deafness to those suffering in America should give people pause, but when Ron Paul is considered a candidate worth talking about, one wonders if sanity even has a place in conservative politics any longer. 


Santorum also wrote an op ed in the Wall Street Journal Monday that advocated simplifying the tax code and cutting $5 trillion from the federal budget over the next five years claiming "I'll work with Congress and the American people to once again create an economic environment where hard work is rewarded, equal opportunity exists for all, and families providing for their children can once again be optimistic about their future." But how cutting the federal budget, reducing taxes and attempting to eliminate affirmative action in all forms would actually accomplish any of this. Would reducing the size and power of government all of a sudden cajole corporations into fair wages? Would ending government intervention in the market and cutting educational funding somehow restore equality of opportunity? And would relying even more on a market that has failed over and over again really make people more optimistic? Lawrence Summers apparently ignored analysis from one of his economists back in 2009 that argued for a economic revitalization package almost double that which was implemented. Current economic data seems to indicate that she was right. And yet Republicans want the government to get out of the way of a business and financial community more interested in profits and executive salaries than restoring full employment (and thus increasing consumption). 

The irony is that a public that knows little about economics has a hard time recognizing this rhetoric as empty promises that will simply continue our economic decline. The fact that some still listen to Paul's Austrian economic platform, even as it has been denounced by serious economists, only affirms the point that rhetoric is more important than content today. And this is solidified by a constant rewriting of history to serve contemporary political debates. Sure this has always been done, but the acuity and cynicism at the heart of the reconstruction of the past and present today has reached the level of fairy tale accuracy.