More Compassionate Conservatism

I've heard of mental breakdowns, mental depressions but who's ever heard of mental recessions? Phil Gramm, apparently.

Alright, the Obama campaign may have gotten out the best line in this latest McCain campaign fuckuppery in calling former Sen. Phil Gramm, who has a doctorate in economics, "Dr. Phil." But that still leaves plenty of room for commentary about this what has to be the very epitome of Republican coldbloodedness.

Phil Gramm recently told the Moonie Times that America was "a nation of whiners" for asking for the government for help and that we were hallucinating the Bush-created recession agreed upon by virtually every major economist in the land. Specifically, Gramm called it a "mental recession."

We could, instead, with a simple shift in linguistic focus and a deft redefinition, make all sorts of snide remarks about Bush's own "mental recession", or "slowdown", if you will. But let's focus, instead on Gramm's astoundingly heartless remarks.

Maybe John McCain would actually have a chance if he didn't have to apologize every other day for some stupid or cruel remark made by someone within his campaign. And maybe he'd have an even better chance if he didn't send out surrogates like Phil Gramm to speak on his behalf then laughably try to claim, "He doesn't speak for me, I speak for me" whenever said McCain surrogate shoves their foot in their mouth.

Because what Phil Gramm said about us imagining a recession was so emblematically Republican as to fly in the face of good taste, screamingly obvious economic reality and just plain human decency. It came almost perfectly timed for the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the national emergency in which black people were blamed for being the victims by Republicans who immediately went into whirling dervish mode the minute people began whispering that maybeperhapssorta FEMA and Prince Regent Georgie were a tad slow in responding to the needs of deadbeats, whiners and looters who just happened to be colored. You know, because George II at the time was busy eating cake with McCain and didn't bother bringing any leftovers when he finally got around to blowing through town.

Perhaps Gramm has a Koolaid pump attached to his hip like those insulin pumps you see occasionally, an apparatus that automatically injects Koolaid whenever common sense and reality begin to creep into the dense layers of gray matter of the reptilian Republican brain. Or perhaps it's just because Gramm feels he has to run interference for George W. Bush because they live in the same state of Texas.

Either way, Gramm's assertion that our perception of a recession is all in our minds is more of a commentary of how fevered and warped Gramm's brain is than one of our collective state of mind. How much worse does it have to get before bloated Republican ticks like Gramm get a fucking clue and realize that annual nine figure deficits, a ten digit debt, four and a half dollar-a-gallon gasoline, five and a half dollar-a-gallon diesel, 2.5 million home foreclosures this year alone, a rising unemployment rate and other assorted goodies given to us courtesy of George W. Bush's annual Christmas sack generally add up to a real recession? Throw in neverending tax cuts that McCain is only threatening to endlessly extend and two wars costing us $162 billion a year and that only drives home the reality of Gramm's own mental recession.