BY KAREN WEBB

There is enough blarney in the GOP to gag St. Patrick. It is too nice to call what they do blarney because blarney is cute legends about little people who dance jigs.

It isn’t blarney the GOP is coming out with – it is pure, unadulterated false witness bearing: Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-KY, says the AIG situation is outrageous and is blaming the Obama Administration for not negotiating tougher, even though AIG first received the money last fall from the Federal Reserve and most of the rest under the Bush Administration.

As far as I can tell, we, the 80% owners of AIG, are fulfilling IOU’s for GOP campaign contributions for the GOP deregulating them so they could do anything they wanted with no supervision.

I believe it was George W. Bush who put Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen in charge, and they were in charge of the TARP money that was handed out with no strings attached, and it was the Bush Administration that settled on the terms.

I saw part of the replay of Meet the Press with Rep. Eric Cantor, R-VA, and I hope that the part I didn’t see was where David Gregory asked the hard questions – like about Eric’s wife, the bank executive, whose bank got a couple hundred million.

They say they didn’t need the money; they just restructured to qualify. Her bank is a subsidiary of New York Private Bank and Trust. His office says it was a “freak coincidence.” She is an attorney, a CPA and an investment banker, but according to hubby’s office “It’s not like she’s lobbying for the industry. She has no clue what’s going on up in New York.” It sounds like she is a clueless, ditzy executive.

What I heard Cantor do was admit that the GOP had just spent like crazy and caused this problem, but they had a good reason. The needed money to “support the troops.” He made a point of saying the GOP worked with the Democrats to support the troops.
I think he is saying they were caught in this Catch .22, but it was as funny as the movie.

First, they decided that when you have a surplus you should not put it back in case of an emergency – like a completely unjustifiable war for profit. Who would have known that instead of a bounty in oil for the head of Saddam Hussein, we would end up with a $3 trillion and counting war and occupation? From what I read, I thought it would end like this, but they didn’t read the stuff I read.

So what happened to the surplus? They cut revenue by giving the guys who produced this economic fiasco tax cuts and then they spent the surplus. How hard is that to understand? The tax cuts were supposed to increase jobs and create growth and the GOP claims that happened for seven years, but I didn’t see it.

Why did we start a war we couldn’t afford? We did it to make money for the guys who caused this economic mess.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-MA, said if we can’t keep them from taking huge bonuses for wrecking companies, then maybe we should fire them, even if we would have to go to court to renegotiate the agreement. I thought that was a good idea, but my husband said, “What about the golden parachutes?”

We own 80% of AIG and we either honor the agreements made with the Bush Administration or we have to take them to court. We can’t fire them because we would have to take them to court or honor all the golden parachutes and both would be expensive.

I just can’t see why all this is so hard for the GOP. They are the ones who decided that corporations have the right to free speech in the form of huge campaign contributions. In return, they deregulated corporate America and told us that these guys were going to do the right thing and they didn’t. They screwed everyone, especially unions, on everything. They friggin’ used our 401[k]s and retirement accounts as gambling money.

And then Cantor got really sickening. He wanted to know why Obama has to tour the country promoting his budget. He says if it was a sane budget he wouldn’t need to do that because the people would know it.

He is kidding, he must be. The reason someone has to go to the people and tell them about the budget is because the GOP is lying through their teeth about it. They don’t want to spend anything – even though throughout the Reagan Administration and the Bush II war we were told we needed to spend to stimulate the economy and now the only entity with money is the government using loans from China.

I am not sure that Cantor’s sickeningly arrogant smile is not worse than former Rep. Tom DeLay’s or Bush’s. Bush and the GOP waged the Iraq War and the one on the economy and they are losing both.

Bush said God was leading him and now we know that wasn’t true because the “least of these” are suffering the most and have been since Bush took office.

– Karen Webb lives in Moore, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer