Comedy Tonight: Mike Lane looks at the R's dumping on the president's handling of the economy

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Talk about weird: This morning NPR's Morning Edition had a reporter interviewing House Minority Whip Eric "God Gave Me a Brain but He Can't Make Me Use It" Cantor to find out how long the Obama administration has to deliver on its economic promises. What's weird is that everyone knows, or should know, that Eric Cantor (1) doesn't know anything about economics and (2) automatically opposes, with the fiber of his sad being, everything said by anyone connected to the administration before they even say it.

To judge from his public utterances, Eric not only has no ideas about what to do about the fine mess Republican economics got us into, he seems to be one of those official R's whose view is: "Depression? What depression? I'm doin' fine, man."

And so he did just what you'd expect: He lied his fool head off. Most notably, he simply invented promises he claimed the president had made, starting with an immediate halt to the downslide. Of course the president went out of his way to promise no such thing. The need for immediate action was to try to minimize the further blood-letting. Now, of course, in the tiny Republican brain, our economic woes are all the present administration's fault.

Unfortunately for Eric, the reporter wasn't much interested in his brave rhetoric. All the reporter wanted to know was, how long does the president have? How much clearer was Eric going to have to make it that, as far as he's concerned, that the president has already run out of time -- oh, about Inauguration Day. (Or was it Election Day?)

Now I have major problems with the way the stimulus program and other economic fights have been waged, but they're all in the opposite direction: that the administration conceded way too much -- like those wildly unproductive tax cuts (which I notice Eric wasn't screaming about) -- to Republicans who were never going to support its programs anyway. The R contribution, of course, has been to scream "socialism!" at everything the administration does and cheer every piling on of bad economic news. Nothing seems to gladden a Republican heart more than news of misery and suffering spreading among ordinary Americans, carrying with it as it does the possibility of future votes for a party that has no ideas or even compassion, just self-interest and venom. -- Ken

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