MSNBC's Martin Bashir hit Senate Minority Leader for blaming the problems with our deficit on the last two years of “reckless spending.” After showing a clip of McConnell on the Senate floor, Bashir responded.

BASHIR: Really? Just two years of reckless spending? It seems like Mr. McConnell is suffering a form of long term memory loss. Or maybe he's been taught history by that other master of revisionism, Professor Newt Gingrich. So let's just revisit some important cold, hard facts.

First, it was the Republican President George Bush who took the United States into not one war of necessity, in Afghanistan, but a second war of choice, in Iraq at a cost of countless billions of dollars to the American taxpayer. And all on a bogus claim that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. Second, it was the same George Bush who drastically reduced taxes in 2001, claiming that such an approach would boost the American economy.

In fact, between 2001 and 2007, America experienced its slowest economic growth since the second World War. Again, another bogus claim, another appalling fiscal decision. And now Mr. McConnell stands on the Senate floor and chastises the president and his party for two years of irresponsibility and he assumes that all of us are as incapable as he is of remembering anything that happened more than twenty four months ago.

Given that he can't remember what was going on in 2005, it may be too much to expect Mr. McConnell to reflect on something that was written in 1905, but for the good of the nation, he'd be well advised to take the words of philosopher George Santayana to heart. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”