Marco Rubio Has Learned Nothing. Because his party has learned nothing. OK, back up: this morning the papers and the web are full of nuance-sniffing, as people try to find omens in the SOTU and the GOP response. I don’t think I can add anything useful to all that. But there was one important point in Marco Rubio’s remarks that I don’t think has been highlighted. It’s true, as Andy Rosenthal says, that Rubio mainly reminded us that Republicans don’t like government or taxes; surprise! But he also reminded us that Republicans don’t like reality.
Have I mentioned that I LOVE Paul Krugman? Yeah, I know; I may have mentioned that a time or twelve…but it’s true. I love Krugman for the same reason I adore Rachel Maddow. Yes, they’re both unabashed Liberals, which is reason enough for most on the Right to dismiss them out of hand. No, the reason I’m enamored of Maddow and Krugman is that they deal in FACTS- you know…truth, reality, research, empirically-proven assertions? Things that actually ARE, not just things someone believes or wishes they were?
In truth, Krugman’s devotion to reality is especially notable, in that Republicans seem to have such an adversarial relationship with it. In nailing Marco Rubio, Krugman once again demonstrated that when the truth doesn’t work for Republicans, they’ll happily rewrite it into something they can use. The likelihood that they’ll be fact-checked and called out for their lies and dissembling is often slim to none. The mainstream media passes their assertions along as if their revisionist history is every bit as valid as is the reality depicted by Liberals like Krugman or Maddow.
Unfortunately for fact-challenged Conservatives like Rubio, the mere act of making something up and uttering it into a camera or a microphone does not ipso facto make it true. Funny thing; facts and truth tend to be immutable, backed up by hard evidence and impervious to partisan propagandizing. The passage Krugman lowered the boom on Rubio for is laughable for the ease with which it can be fact checked, though Rubio correctly surmised that little to none of his speech would be parsed by anyone in the mainstream media…except for Krugman.
This idea - that our problems were caused by a government that was too small - it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.
As Krugman points out, the “government-did-it” theory has been thoroughly researched…and even more thoroughly debunked. The Community Reinvestment Act wasn’t responsible for the epidemic of irresponsible subprime lending, nor were Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. In fact, private institutions accounted for 84% of subprime lending in 2006…and yet no one seems willing to blame those actually responsible- the banks.
As The Huffington Post’s Ben Hallman points out,
All told, the Center for Public Integrity reported in 2011, mortgages financed by Wall Street from 2001 to 2008 were 4½ times more likely to be seriously delinquent than mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddie.
The government didn’t do it…not that Rubio or virtually any other Republican in Washington will acknowledge the truth. That would be inconvenient, and it would certainly undercut the GOP plot to grind President Obama’s agenda into the dust.
For Republicans, it’s not about the truth; it’s about what they can convince the American Sheeple is true. In their world, truth is relative, a fungible commodity that can be massaged and molded as needed to match the day’s talking points. It’s dishonest and its reprehensible, but neither Marco Rubio nor most of the rest of the GOP are renowned for their integrity and devotion to the truth. The truly sad aspect of this sorry state of affairs is that the mainstream media can’t be bothered to engage in even a minimum of fact checking.
THAT’S why I love Paul Krugman.
