It’s on.
The Republicans, evidently spearheaded by Drudge, are clearly attempting to conflate the bank bailouts with the recovery bill. Here’s this morning’s Drudge screamer:
If you click the link, it takes you to a Bloomberg story indicating that the $9.7 trillion is actually a complicated mixture of the bank bailouts and projected government stimulus, even though the headline only mentions “bailouts” and how the Senate is apparently voting on a “bailout” today.
Recently, there’s been pundit chatter about how some Americans are inadvertently confusing the two (very different) government plans. It now appears as if the Republicans will be seizing upon this confusion in order to further diminish public support for the recovery bill.
We’ve seen this tactic before. Most notably, the deliberate conflation of Iraq and September 11. And during the campaign there was the fringe tactic of deliberately mixing up Barack Obama’s Senate oath on a Bible with Keith Ellison’s congressional oath on the Koran.
