Novak: Shameless Hack, Still By: Mark W Adams

During a confusing week on Capitol Hill, lawmakers engaged in games that were difficult for insiders to understand and incomprehensible to ordinary voters.

-- Novakula

The patronizing mindset it requires to write that sentence exposes so much about the Versailles Press in Washington. I get it Bob. You're smart and wired into the people who matter, while the rest of us hicks are just too dumb to understand.

Please, please Bobby, edu-ma-cate us ignorant slobs. (What a prick.)

So he goes out of his way to perpetuate the Republican's favorite myth about irresponsible tax-and-spend Democrats trying to pull a fast one by loading up an appropriations bill for Vets with a bunch of earmarks. But where was this criticism of pork laden spending bills when the GOP was in charge?

Novak made special mention that "Citizens Against Government Waste found 2,274 earmarks worth $1 billion in the bill," as an example of the greedy Democrats loading up this important legislation with expensive pet projects -- so he could "prove" Democratic Party mismanagement.

[BTW, Citizens Against Government Waste, as you might have guessed, is part of a Right-Wing think tank/lobby outfit whose clients include Microsoft and big tobacco, funded in part by the Tobacco Institute, Phillip Morris, RJR Nabisco, Merrill Lynch, and everybody's favorite corporation, Exxon. None other than nutball Alan Keyes was it's president from '89 to '91, and it's founder J. Peter Grace, a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Reaganista involved in the Iran-Contra scandal had some very nefarious doings with former Nazi War Criminals.]

Yet even according to Novak's source for the out-of-control spending by the Democratic Congress, the 2005 "Pig Book" says that the GOP was responsible for a "record 13,997 projects" at a cost of $27.3 Billion. That dropped in 2006 (an election year where waste and corruption were top issues, go figure) to 9,963 -- yet the cost went up to $29 Billion.

And what's the total on earmarked pork this year? Noting that only two of the eleven appropriations bills have passed, and that there is a "moratorium on earmarks" for the other nine -- Congress has passed 2,658 for a cost of only $13.2 Billion.

Novak makes no mention of what a decrease in earmarking this was from the GOP's recent trip to the taxpayer trough -- "by 2005 the earmarks had multiplied to 6,371, or nearly 10% of total spending," in just the Highway Bill to Nowhere alone. He doesn't want us bothered by petty details like the almost 55% decrease in pork barrel spending in actual dollars from last year, or the 80% drop in individual earmarks reflected in this year's legislation compared to the last non election year.

Oh, I get it Uncle Bob. You're right, us ordinary folks out here in the hinter-land would never have made the connection that the Democrats are still horribly wasteful without you pointing it out to us with your misleading numbers and arbitrary standards. I forgot that Democrats=waste, Republicans=fiscal responsibility. I couldn't understand your enlightened wisdom without seeing it through your stupidity prism.

Thanks. I'm glad you cleared that up for us.