It wasn't quite Jennifer Rubin level of idiocy on this Tuesday's Morning Joe, as they discussed the Republicans' latest dishonest attacks on the stimulus package on the five year anniversary of its passage, but it wasn't far off either.
After playing a portion of Sen. Marco Rubio's statement calling the stimulus a failure, Mrs. Greenspan chimed in and complained that it didn't live up to the hype and credited Ben Bernanke with saving our economy rather than the stimulus. I'm sure she's happy that he kept her stock portfolio from collapsing, but propping up Wall Street and the financial sector was not responsible for putting Americans back to work.
And then the viewers were treated to this by former Bushie and McCain campaign manager, Nicolle Wallace:
WALLACE: I think that when Mitch McConnell calls it a tragedy, this is, this felt to Republicans, and I remember John McCain saying it at the time, "This is generational theft." That's what Republicans felt about the stimulus, that we were stealing from future generations to do something that would not make a dent in the employment situation.
And you don't have to buy Marco Rubio's argument Mika. You can just look at recent public opinion polls that shows that Americans now overwhelmingly believe that unemployment is this country's gravest problem and they don't see the stimulus as having done enough to help.
So Wallace wants us to believe that the stimulus, not the bank bailout, was generational theft. That's rich. And those public opinion polls aren't worth the paper they're written on when you've got a public that is continually deceived and misinformed by our corporate media day in and day out.
Richard Haass followed up by saying he agreed with Mitchell, and took the opportunity to do a little fearmongering on the debt and deficit and how we must get "entitlements" under control immediately or we're doomed. So let's stick it to the poors to balance the budget because heaven forbid we can't have his or Andrea's taxes going up.
Thankfully there was some sanity to follow when Eugene Robinson and Sam Stein had a chance to weigh in, but neither one of them did enough to counter the mountain of bullshit put out there before they had a chance to speak.
Someone at MSNBC needs to tell Mitchell and Wallace to go read their colleague Steve Benen's column from this week on the stimulus: The Recovery Act, five years later
I highly recommend for everyone to read all of it, but here are a couple of the charts from his post for now.