Outrage? Where is your HONESTY?

Today’s dose of Leftist revisionism and propaganda comes from Where is the Outrage:

GOP Equals Hypocrisy — With Eric Cantor walking out of the high-level debt ceiling negotiation, I thought it’d be interesting to look back and figure out how many times the House Majority Leader and his colleagues voted to raise the debt ceiling under George W. Bush. One would figure, because they are fiscally conservative, they probably only voted to raise the debt ceiling once or twice under the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush. The GOP hypocrites raised the debt ceiling … 7 times … under George W. Bush and not once did they hold the president hostage to debt ceiling negotiations. (H/T: Babbazee)

The bias and motivation are obvious. It’s also obvious that, in order for his claim (that hypocrisy is exclusively a GOP trait) to be true, that the Democrats (including Obama) must have remained consistent on their positions towards the debt ceiling. But since they voted against raising the debt ceiling under Bush, but are rabidly in favor of it now, why is a change of attitude only evidence of hypocrisy when the GOP does it? Surely, on that basis, if hypocrisy exists at all, it must certainly exist on both sides of Congress (and in the White House as well), no?

Of course, that makes the assumption that the situation under Bush then is identical to the situation under Obama now. If the only thing that’s different is that a Democrat (or “a black man”, to quote the deranged Sheila Jackson Lee and others) is in the White House now instead of Bush, and that this is the sole reason for the change in opinion (on both sides); then yes, a claim of hypocrisy may credibly be made (although the claims of racism, lack of patriotism, and so forth also being hurled at the GOP remain unsupported and reprehensible). However, the situation is not identical…

Simple economic logic (which nonetheless eludes the White House that never ran a lemonade stand) tells you that you can borrow and spend forever; that sooner or later you’ll run out of cash and credit and have to stop. Given that Obama has ballooned the deficit more than every previous president combined with his completely ineffective Stimulus, his massive Health Care Reform boondoggle, his constant redistributing and throwing away of cash with absolutely no end in sight, one can clearly make the argument that the time to step back and assess our finances is now. At the very least, it’s time for an intervention in which we take away the checkbook from Obama and enforce some of the restraint with which he is completely and sorely lacking. There are quite reasonable and credible reasons for those who voted in favor of raising the debt ceiling in the past to be hesitant to do so now, given the current state of the economy, and the never-ending avarice of the current president. Racism and hypocrisy are not necessarily the only reasons, not are they even the most likely.

However, I admit I’m at a loss to come up with any good reasons for the Democrats to reverse their rhetoric in favor of raising the debt ceiling now, when they so vociferously opposed it in the past. If it was wrong to raise it then, when the deficit and the federal government were so much smaller, why is it suddenly a better idea now when we’re on the precipice of total collapse and the President is pushing toward the edge as fast and as hard as he can? There may be a reason other than hypocrisy, but I don’t see a more likely one. (As a disclaimer, I was in favor of slashing spending, balancing the budget, and decreasing our debt long before it was cool.)