1 Boring Old Man

DeMint: It’s the largest spending bill in history and we’re trying to call it a stimulus.

Frank: The largest spending bill in history is going to turn out to be the one in Iraq. If we’re going to talk about spending, I have a problem when we leave out that extraordinary expensive, damaging war in Iraq, which has caused much more harm than good in my judgment.

I don’t understand from my conservative friends: building a road, building a school, helping to get health care, that’s wasteful spending. But that war in Iraq, that’s going to cost us over a trillion dollars, yeah, I wish we hadn’t done that; we would have been in a lot better shape fiscally…

That’s the problem… we look at spending and say don’t spend on highways or health care. Let’s build weapons to defeat the Soviet Union when we don’t need them. Let’s have hundreds of billions of dollars going to the military without a check. Unless everything is on the table, then you are going to have a disproportionate hit in some places.

But Barney’s response is refreshing. It’s the kind of thing we haven’t heard in a long time. He could have pointed out that the operative word here is "building" in "building a road, building a school" which is where the stimulus is – putting unemployed people to work while restoring our infrastructure. And he could have pointed out that "helping to get health care" is a dramatic stimulus, getting people out from under medical expenses. But Barney didn’t get defensive.

Paraphrasing, Barney said two things: spending money on the public welfare is what government is for and spending money on super-duper weapons is not what government is for anymore – the crazy Arms Race is over. But he also said the thing that isn’t spoken, "…that war in Iraq, that’s going to cost us over a trillion dollars, yeah, I wish we hadn’t done that; we would have been in a lot better shape fiscally." The operative phrase here is, "I wish we hadn’t done that."

I wish we hadn’t done that too. In fact, almost all of America wishes we hadn’t done that. What we wish is that the government had listened to the C.I.A. about al Qaeda. We wish that the response to 9/11 and al Qaeda had been… well, we wish it had been a response to 9/11 and al Qaeda. We wish that the Bush Administration hadn’t gone to Iraq without planning what to do when we got there and not planning how to pay for the War. We wish that the government had paid attention to the economy instead of letting Alan Greenspan wizard around with his sophomoric Ayn Rand ideas until it crumbled.