Cheney goes Time Warp on PBS Newshour

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Many decades ago, there was a Lon Chaney who scared the bejeezus out of audiences whenever her appeared. His namesake Dick Cheney, who is hawking an unapologetic book about his years in the Bush43 administration, is not much different.

Few would expect the former Vice President to apologize for misleading the public into believing Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, so it should come as no surprise that he's still a master obfuscater hell-bent on misleading the electorate. From the PBS Newshour site:

JUDY WOODRUFF: You talk about national security more than the economy in the book. But when it comes to deficits, you responded to something that Paul O'Neill, the former treasury secretary, wrote, when at one point you told him Ronald Reagan proved deficits don't matter.

You responded he took you out of context; that is not really what you meant. But, today, how much of a priority should there be on deficits?

DICK CHENEY: Oh, there has to be a big priority on it.

We're to the point now, especially as a result of looking at our long-term debt problem and entitlements in particular, we have to have -- I hope the special committee that's been appointed will, in fact, adopt a major program to reduce our deficits.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Even though there wasn't that sort of focus on deficits in your administration?

DICK CHENEY: Well, first of all, the deficit wasn't nearly as big obviously as it is today. It's been significantly expanded under the Obama administration.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, it was $400 billion when you and President Bush left office.

DICK CHENEY: But now we're talking about a deficit, a debt that rivals our total national annual economy of upwards of $14 trillion.

The situation today is more serious than it was then. It's going to require us to go after entitlements, as well as all other aspects of federal spending. And it's essential that we do it.

That's right, Dick Cheney is pushing the Republican Time Warp strategy for 2012. And Ms Woodruff seems to be helping him. In fact, the last Bush-Cheney budget (for FY2009) was some three times that $400 billion amount, and his administration and other Republican administrations are responsible for about $10 trillion of that $14 trillion.

Republican policy in a nutshell: Budget deficits and national debt don't matter, unless the Democrats are in the White House, at which time we cry "national emergency!" over the problem and hope the hop polloi forgets that we created it.

...

Republican Time Warp Watch: Pawlenty says "three years"

It's just a jump to the left
And then a step to the right
With your hands on your hips
You bring your knees in tight
But it's the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane,
Let's do the Time Warp again!

President Barack Hussein Obama, as of today, has been president for two years, five months, and twenty days, but the Republicans have for weeks or months insisted on calling his presidency (so far) "three years" or even "four years."

It is the Republican Time Warp, part of their Year Zero strategy where they try to make the American people believe that all the problems we now face began with the Obama administration and that the previous Republican administration and, two years before Obama took office, the GOP-run House and Senate, had nothing to do with soaring national debt, high unemployment, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc., etc.

Today, ten days shy of exactly two years and six months since Obama's inauguration, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, one of the candidates seeking to be the GOP nominee for president, made this strategy part of his rhetoric on NBC's Meet the Press today:

But we've had three years of a president of soaring rhetoric, gave all these false hopes and false promises to the country. If you want somebody who's had executive leadership, who has not just rhetoric, but results on taxes, on spending, on health care, on jobs and the like, then vote for me.

It wasn't a slip-up, as he said it twice, though in a slightly mitigating way:

He was blaming President Bush, blaming the weather, blaming the Republicans. We're almost three years into this administration. President Obama should look in the mirror to see who's to blame for the economy in its current state, and it's not doing well. And as to the debt ceiling...

Bonus points, Pawlenty, for trying to pin "the economy in its current state" on President Obama.

But 2.47 is not "almost three." Obama is barely halfway through his first/only term, and he inherited an awful lot or problems, and frankly, Republicans playing chicken with the debt ceiling and constantly talking down the economy even when it has been doing well are all eroding confidence, confidence which are part of what is needed to get things on track again. But I guess fuzzy math and keeping things bad long enough to propel Michele Bachmann looks like a winning strategy for the GOP.

UPDATE:
I pressed PUBLISH before I heard this gem:

GOV. PAWLENTY: President Obama exponentially made the deficit worse and the debt worse. I mean, he's essentially tripled it. In March of 2009, David, he looked the American people in the eye and said, "I will cut the deficit in half during my first term."

MR. GREGORY: Well, let's not forget, his Republican predecessor did all the TARP, did all the bailout spending and ran up the deficit.

Not only does this include a suspect figure — Bush43 had a $500 billion debt largely because TARP and a number of other big-ticket expenses were discretionary spending that weren't included in the budget — but it is also spoken in such a way that it sounds like Obama tripled the debt.

In fact, the debt is about $10 trillion from Republican administrations and $4 trillion from Democrats (mostly Obama, who inherited Bush43's economic crisis and budget deficit). Also tripling something is not quite an exponential increase. Exponential increases typically involve at least squaring something.

And let's not forget that Obama's first term is nowhere near being finished, though I agree that the likelihood of halving the deficit by the 2013 budget (beginning October 2012) is getting less and less likely consider the impasse that the Tea Party-fearing GOP and the Democrats are at.

Republicans, warped time, and the "Year Zero" gambit

Quick quiz: How long has Obama been president?

If you're too lazy to calculate it in your head, at least think about whether it's closer to two years or three. Go on, I'll wait. I've got Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica on Netflix instant-view.

Answer: As of two Sundays ago when I started writing this, Barack Hussein Obama had been our president for two years, four months, three weeks, and two days. Slightly over 2-1/3 years. Not even past the 2-1/2 mark you would need to hit in order to round up all the way to three years. Well over half a year shy of three years.

But if you're a Republican operative trying to pull the wool over the public's eyes, you might be used to saying that Barack Hussein Obama has been at the helm for three years. As evidence, look at a speech given by former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty:

Speaking yesterday at the University of Chicago, where Obama once taught law, Pawlenty said Obama has “spent three years dividing our nation and fanning the flames of class envy and resentment all across the country to deflect attention from his own failures and the economic hardship they have visited on America.”

Well, at first I thought that one was not as clear: after all, he could have been counting the months on the campaign trail, but at that time it was the prior administration trying to "deflect attention from his own failures and the economic hardship they have visited on America."

This is becoming a clear pattern from Republicans. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the supposed Republican frontrunner, did the same thing during the recent Republican debate:

When he took office his number one job was to get the economy to turn around...so now, three years later, we have high unemployment...we still have, three years later, home foreclosures at record levels...and what does he have to say about this? He says "I'm just getting started."

On NBC's Meet the Press (15:30), the Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus posed to voters the question "whether or not people believe that they're better off today than they were three or four years ago."

Excuse me? "Three or four years ago"?

Four years ago we were about midway into the second term of one George W. Bush. Three years ago we had not yet witnessed the meltdown of our economy that occurred on Mr Bush's watch.

But it's easy to see what Republicans are trying to do with Americans who are lazily calculating backward from 2011 and getting to 2008, even though Obama did not become president until the end of January 2009.

Leapfrogging backward to a time when things had not yet fallen apart, in order to pin the entire mess on Obama, is absurd. But it might just gain some votes from the amnesia-stricken.

Of course, that's not the only reason for warping time: by making people think Obama has been in office longer than he has, it makes it seem more more like he is a failure for not having solved the economic mess already. That is, at two years or so, he may legitimately be getting the ball rolling on fixing an economic disaster that was many more years in the making, but at three or four years, we should be seeing far better numbers, right?

This kind of dishonesty makes me think I cannot support whatever candidate uses this tactic.

See, the whole purpose of the Year Zero tactic is that Republicans don't want you to think about how we got from surplus spending at the end of the Clinton administration to the astronomical deficit spending we're at now. They want you to think this all began with Obama and that the deficit is all the responsibility of the Democrats instead of breaking down to $10 trillion from Republican administrations and a mere $4 trillion from Democrats (mostly Obama, owing to the problems and the budget he inherited from Bush43).

And if you do recall that the economy was at the abyss before Obama became president, you should be thinking that any of the Republicans would have fixed it all by now. The Republicans are banking on the voters forgetting just how dangerously close we were to Great Depression 2.0 so that they will believe the lingering problems are because of Obama's policies and not his predecessors'.

It's a powerful strategy, banking on voter amnesia, and I think that the only way Obama can win is with stronger numbers (and indications are they will get better, despite this past month's blip of only 55K jobs created) and driving home just how bad things were when he became president in 2009.

This may involve bringing up things from his opponents' past. This shouldn't be too hard; in the June 13 broadcast of Meet the Press (7:25), host David Gregory trotted out something Mr Santorum had said way back in December 2002:

I think we're going to be in for deficits for the next few years to come. We're in a recession — just coming out of a recession — and secondly we're going to be fighting a war, a major war on terrorism, and potentially a war in Iraq. The last thing we need to do when we're concerned about national security of this country is be concerned about deficits.

Whoa. Quite a gotcha moment there. But wait, it's all different this time. When the host asks why, in the same circumstances (recession, two wars, etc.), deficits didn't matter then but they do now, Mr Santorum meekly responds, "Well, I think scale matters... Prior to 2001, we were in a surplus. We were talking about deficits of a hundred to two hundred billion dollars, not $1.5 trillion, not something that is grinding our economy down."

He goes on to explain that this was "immediately" right after we were attacked (time warp problem again, as this was over a year after the attacks that he was saying that). But in the spirit of the Year Zero gambit, what he neglects to explain was how we ended up with some $6 trillion in debt from that administration.

Just where the hell were all these budget hawks? Why did they not suddenly appear until 2009? With a successful Year Zero gambit, you won't have to think about that.

And this is part of that other great meme — that Obama is at heart the cause of the astronomical national debt — that also is getting play among Republicans. From the first Santorum link, at about 4:10 in this link, he says:

Sure, he came in with a problem, and in that whole he kept digging. And digging And digging.

Now for every dollar we spend, thanks to this president, forty cents is borrowed. Forty cents is gonna be put on every man, woman, and child, to pay the interest on for the rest of their lives. ...

Who are you, Mr. President? Who are you, Mr. President, to say that you and your administration should take forty cents out of every dollar and borrow it from future generations to prop you up?

Wow. Just wow. Listening to that you'd get the impression that it was Obama himself who ran up the $14 trillion and that $10 trillion of it wasn't actually from Republican administrations.

No wonder Santorum and his supporters say "President Obama... wrecked our economy."

UPDATE:
Representative Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party favorite also running for president, is riding the three-year meme:

In February 2009, President Obama was very confident that his economic policies would turn the country around within a year. He said -- and I quote -- "A year from now, I think people are going to see that we're starting to make some progress. If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition."

Well, Mr. President, your policies haven't worked. Spending our way out of the recession hasn't worked. And, so, Mr. President, we take you at your word.

Well, at least she got the timeline sorta right. Except the three-year mark would be sometime early next year. At least this comment is more defensible than the other comments, as one cannot expect everything to be resolved by January 20, 2012. But if things are clearly going in an upward direction, people who are confident things are getting better and who remember how bad things actually had gotten may just vote again for Barack Hussein Obama.