As the new Congress (aka "The Crackpot 114th") opens, we could laugh or we could weep

Miss Mitch, er, beamed at Tuesday's swearing in in the Old Senate Chamber

"After so many years of sluggish growth, we're finally starting to see some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope. The uptick appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration's long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new Republican Congress."

-- silver-tongued "Miss Mitch" McConnell,
taking over the helm of the U.S. Senate yesterday

by Ken

That's right. After six years of doing everything in his power to doodify the country, after the eight years which the country's economic elites stole every bit of the economy they could get their mitts on, so that his masters in economic predation could strut in and take complete possession of everything that's left, Miss Mitch now lives up to his reputation as the most dishonest creature on the face of the earth by claiming that the recent positive economic news, instead of showing that he and his henchcreeps didn't succeed entirely in laying waste to the country, proves that The Putrid Will Inherit the Earth.

Greg Sargent, for one, isn't surprised. He writes today ("Mitch McConnell takes credit for the recovery. Here’s why you should take that seriously."):

The other day, your humble blogger made a fairly mundane and obvious prediction: “how long until the notion that the recovery is all due to increased confidence stemming from the GOP takeover of Congress becomes an article of faith inside the Conservative Entertainment Complex?”

Today, Mitch McConnell gave voice to exactly this idea on the Senate floor. He claimed this morning that the “glimmer of hope” and “uptick” we’re seeing in the economic data “appears to coincide” with the “expectation of a new Republican Congress.”

A lot of people, Greg notes, are finding this funny, or at least ironic. Greg, not so much. He points to the line that followed Miss Mitch's announcement that all the recent positive economic news may be attributable to the coming of Republican governance:

So this is precisely the right time to advance a positive, pro-growth agenda.

And that, Greg is here to tell us, is "what this is really about."

The idea is that the increased confidence generated by the impending GOP takeover of Congress is responsible for the recovery — which is exactly why we should now go forward with implementing a Republican economic agenda.

The significance of this is that, unsurprisingly, continued good economic news — and other good news, such as the falling deficit — are not going to alter the GOP agenda or analysis of the current situation in the slightest. The analysis implied by McConnell’s speech is that the GOP takeover of Congress brings with it the expectation of tax relief for job creators, and relief from the Big Gummint regulatory overreach that is supposedly dragging down the recovery — and that these tantalizing possibilities are really the drivers of the good economic news.

Indeed, all that good news will be pressed into service to bolster the case for more high end tax cuts and another push for deeper spending cuts later this year. The corollary to this is the GOP’s imposition of “dynamic scoring” at the Congressional Budget Office. As Jonathan Chait explains, this will require the CBO, in analyzing coming GOP proposals, to be guided by the idea that tax cuts juice the economy by unshackling the job creators and therefore they pay for themselves — which is to say, to adopt the broad set of Republican economic assumptions that has animated the party for decades.

Today’s ideological shift at the CBO, and McConnell’s forward-looking suggestion that the good economic news must somehow be related to the anticipation of GOP fiscal policies, are interrelated.

Dana Milbank too (in "Mitch McConnell is off to a bitter start") looks beyond the crypto-comical portions of Miss Mitch's peroration.

McConnell, when he wasn’t taking credit for things that preceded his ascent, gave a remarkably angry and ungracious first speech to the body he now leads. It was an 18-minute snarl, dripping with contempt and packed with campaign-style barbs for the president. He didn’t even offer an expression of condolences to the French after the terrorist attack Wednesday in Paris. (He mentioned the carnage to reporters later, after lunch.)

"Such addresses," Dana writes, "are times to summon togetherness and high purpose," and he argues that "Sunny John" Boehner "hit the themes just right" in his House version of the session-opening speech on Tuesday,

when he called for civility in the battle of ideas. “All I ask, and frankly expect, is that we disagree without being disagreeable,” he said, offering a stirring call to achievement: “Let’s make this a time of harvest, and may the fruits of our labors be ladders our children can use to climb the stairs to the stars.”

Personally, I have every confidence that Sunny John will quickly and emphatically live down to his normal "I drop doody on America" history. But shit, when your rhetoric is being compared unfavorably to Sunny John's, you must really suck. By contrast with this shining model, Dana writes, "McConnell took the Senate on the low road." He "stood still at his desk, lips pursed, clearing his throat often, and reading a grim message."

Dana notes points in Miss Mitch's "diatribe" where he detected "seeds of a magnanimous speech that never took root." A magnanimous speech, from Miss Mitch? For the record, Dana points to his tribute to productive lawmakers of the past, and his "pledge to return 'regular order' to the Senate and the spending process,: which Dana pronounces "an admirable goal." (We apparently have different ideas of what Miss Mitch might mean by "regular order.") "But," says Dana,

he spent more of his time scolding, and looking backward at the “countless common-sense bipartisan bills” that “died right here” during the Democrats’ control of the Senate. He chided President Obama’s “anything but productive” threat to veto the Keystone XL oil pipeline. “Bipartisan compromise may not come easily for the president — not his first inclination,” the majority leader said with a sneer. “The president’s supporters are pressing for militancy these days . . . the comforts of purity over the duties of progress.” He said Obama and the Democrats should “accept reality,” turn from their “exhausted 20th-century mind-set” — and do what Republicans want.

“It's not our job to protect the president from good ideas," Dana quotes Miss Mitch saying. "No," says Dana, "it's apparently McConnell's job to chide and to taunt -- and to make the next two years as bitter and unproductive as the last four.

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