Mark Steyn already commented on Frank Rich’s typically insufferable column today, but this part also seemed egregious:

If the country wasn’t suffering, the Republicans’ behavior would be a laugh riot. The House minority leader, John Boehner, from the economic wasteland of Ohio, declared on “Meet the Press” last Sunday that the G.O.P. didn’t want to be “the party of ‘No’ ” but “the party of better ideas, better solutions.” And what are those ideas, exactly? He said he’ll get back to us “over the coming months.”

If Rich wants to excoriate the G.O.P. for having a lack of ideas in general, that’s his perogative. However, considering the crux of his column is to upbraid Republicans for not helping pass the bloated and irresponsible stimulus bill, er, failing to “pitch in and play a serious role at a time of national peril” you would think the honest thing to do would be to at least acknowledge that the Republicans have put forward their own set of stimulus ideas, even if only to dismiss them. But hey, never let a Google search get in the way of a good piece of sophistry.

Another niggling thing about Rich’s column — the headline “Herbert Hoover Lives.” Hoover’s name has been thrown around a lot here in the past few months as a way of smearing the contemporary G.O.P. But which party is acting the most like Hoover now? Two months ago, a far better columnist than Rich pointed out “President Herbert Hoover increased [federal spending] more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt.” And two weeks ago, Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy pretty muched demolished the liberal caricature of Hoover pursuing laissez-faire policies that failed to stop the depression:

Speaking before the 1932 Republican Convention, Hoover boasted that he had rejected the “disastrous” option of doing “nothing” and instead had “met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.” In that same 1932 campaign, FDR even denounced Hoover for overspending and promised to enact a balanced budget.
Nor were Hoover’s interventionist policies a sudden change of heart caused by the Great Depression. He had advocated extensive increases in government spending and regulation for years, especially during his time as Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s. Even before the Depression began, the Hoover Administration promoted federal intervention in labor relations and massive farm subsidies.
None of this is news to economic historians. By the 1960s and 70s, research by a variety of scholars had shown that Hoover was anything but a laissez faire advocate. Liberal historian Joan Hoff Wilson’s 1975 book Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive is a good summary of the evidence.

So yes, Herbert Hoover lives — and he’s been reincarnated as a donkey.

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