Vanden Heuvel did a great job laying out the basic argument for the Republican fiscal hypocrisy.
However, more revealing in this clip is Rove's laundry list of excuses. When confronted by the irresponsible policies of the Bush administration, he blames everything from September 11 to Katrina to two wars as if he and his boss had no control over any of it -- as if someone came along and forced the administration to go to war or to blow a trillion dollars in a tax cut for Paris Hilton and Wall Street CEOs.
He seems to imply that if there are enough excuses, then record deficit spending is okay. Well, if we're going to play on those terms, President Obama is only a month into his presidency and he's facing both of Bush's wars. He's facing Bush's huge bureaucracy. He's facing all of the debt that Bush created. He's facing the reality that much of Bush's spending wasn't even included in the budget. He's facing an enormous energy and environmental crisis generated by decades of Republican ignorance. He's facing skyrocketing healthcare costs, and he's facing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
President Obama is, in fact, confronting all of George W. Bush's problems, plus a variety of brand new ones. Yet, somehow in Rove's world, there's no excuse for Obama's spending and every excuse in the world for Bush's.
What also made the Bush Republican spending far worse is that it contained none of the regulatory checks that ought to have gone along with a doubling of the debt and a record deficit. How many billions of dollars just vanished in Iraq? How many billions of dollars were handed out in no-bid contracts? What kind of stimulative effect did that have, Karl?