Newt is such a charmer, isn’t he? I love that, when he appears in the GOP primary debates, he spends 3½ of his alotted 4 minutes deriding the question and the questioner and castigating the media as a whole. There’s no better way to garner positive press than treat the members of the press as pariahs and sociopaths, is there?
Well, there’s another group Newt ingratiated himself with this week: the nonpartisan group that scores our nation’s bill as to their impact on the nation’s budget & economy – The Congressional Budget Office (CBO). During a speech in New Hampshire Monday, he said “The Congressional Budget Office is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.” It is not known if Mr. Gingrich also believes the CBO’s mother wears military footwear.
The CNN Money article has a great quote from Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director and Republican:
[Holtz-Eakin] called the Gingrich allegation “ludicrous.”“I think if you parse that phrase carefully, he got one out of three right,” Holtz-Eakin said. “I do agree it is an institution. If you’re playing baseball, that’s a decent batting average.”
SNAP!
Newt, to me, is the Donald Rumsfeld of the Republican Primary Clown Show™. Rumsfeld could always be counted on to treat anyone asking him a question, like, strangely enough, in the middle of the Q&A section of a press conference, like they were the biggest dolt in the room. His answers always seemed laced with a healthy serving of “Why to hell do I have to be plagued with mental midgets like you asking me insipid unimportant questions?”
Oh, by the way? Speaking of the CBO? Yesterday the CBO said President Obama’s policies are improving the economy.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Tuesday that President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package continues to benefit the struggling economy.The agency said the measure raised gross domestic product by between 0.3 and 1.9 percent in the third quarter of 2011, which ended Sept. 30. The Commerce Department said Tuesday that GDP in that quarter was only 2 percent total.
CBO said that the stimulus also lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.2 and 1.3 percentage points and increased the number of people employed by between 0.4 million and 2.4 million.
Reactionary socialists, indeed. Just in time for the holidays.
