It's hard to tell if Eric Cantor's testing a new message, or if this is the new Republican line on the Democrats and the state of affairs in the country, but Politico reports that, at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast this morning, the House GOP whip, said Democrats are "overreacting, as they often will, to crisis."
But back to this morning. Cantor told participants that "Doing too much has huge, huge pitfalls," better, in other words, to err on the side of doing too little.
Then, after praising Rush Limbaugh, he added that those pitfalls might propel Republicans back into control of the House in 2010--a feat that would require them, in historic fashion, to take at least 40 seats back from the Democrats.
Here is House GOP Leader Eric Cantor's quote of the Democrats overreacting to the economic crisis:
“As far as Rush, Rush has got ideas. He’s got following. He believes in the conservative principles that many of us believe in –- of lower taxes, of making sure that we turn back towards a focus on entrepreneurialism in this country, to promoting innovation and not stamping that out by over-reacting, if you will, which this town often does, to crisis.”
You can listen to the audio here via Plum Line.
The only thing I can think of is that Cantor is trying to galvanize the conservative base in opposing President Barack Obama's budget, and economic stimulus plan. And Cantor is talking to the base here by equating radio commentator Rush Limbaugh's "ideas" as a...conservative mandate? Rush Limbaugh wants President Obama to fail. I'm guessing that Cantor, since he believes in Rush's ideas, also wants President Obama to fail. Is this the Republican Party stance now? Because the day President Obama took the oath of office, the Republican congressional minority has been obstructing and criticizing everything the Obama White House, and the Democratic congressional leadership, have attempted to do in slowing the serious economic recession this country is currently in.
Of course, there is more. There is this incredibly insane quote from Cantor that the Democrats are "overreacting" to the nation's economic crisis. Overreacting? Excuse me, Mr. Cantor, but it was the Republican leadership in Congress, and the Bush White House that got us into this mess in the first place. That was when the GOP forced these huge tax cuts to the rich, while at the same time sent the U.S. into two disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, paying for everything by the nation's credit card. The Bush administration refused to enforce any type of regulatory oversight in the financial industry--let alone any industry--during the past eight years. Not only have we doubled our own national debt, from $5 trillion to $10 trillion dollars under the Bush administration, but an entire Ponzi scheme of repackaging investment securities based on over-valued home prices and subprime mortgages was also built up--even to the point of making exotic derivative hedges on these investments based on bad subprime debt. This entire house of cards has now crashed down, leading to a collapse of Wall Street investment firms and the billions of American taxpayer dollars that have been spent to bail these investment firms out. American consumers have closed up their wallets, fearful over whether they will still have a job, fearful of whether they can afford their homes--whose values have dropped underwater--and fearful of their retirement funds having been wiped out by this collapse. The U.S. is in a serious economic recession here that will not only take hundreds of billions of dollars of economic stimulus, but a serious reevaluation of how the federal government will regulate the business and financial industry to avoid construction of another house of cards. But Eric Cantor says that the Democrats are overreacting to this serious economic crisis.
I really do not know what to say.
Update: Looks like the Democratic Party has quickly responded to Cantor's rhetoric:
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