In the view of the New York Times, everything that ails our nation is caused by Republicans.
Consider Saturday's editorial disgracefully titled "Magical Unrealism: In the Iowa Debate, Republicans Fled From the Truth About the Damage Caused by Their Party":
In full public view, the party's mainstream jumped the tracks of reality on issues of spending and taxes, brightly illustrating the ruinous magical thinking that has led to a downgrade of the nation's credit and invited a double-dip recession. When asked if they would reject a deal to cut the deficit that had 10 times the amount of spending cuts as it had tax increases, the hands of all eight candidates went up. Even a tincture of new revenue, though mixed with huge cuts in government spending, would be too much for the modern Republican Party.
That's correct. It would be too much - for two reasons.
First, what caused last week's downgrade by Standard and Poor's was the runaway spending of Democrats since they took over Congress in 2007 and the White House in 2009. A 41 percent increase in outlays over only four years as the nation is in a recession and thereby experiencing a revenue decline does not engender confidence from credit rating agencies.
A President in the wake of such recklessness offering a budget that further increases debt by almost ten trillion dollars in the next ten years similarly signals to such organizations that the White House doesn't give a rat's bum about the amount of red ink it's racking up. Ditto an entire political Party that for over two years has refused to even bother proposing a budget and has blocked both bills offered and passed by House Republicans that would have prevented a downgrade.
Consider too that if the deficit was actually a concern to the Democrats, they should have incorporated tax hikes into their spending increases.
For years, the Left and their media minions have pointed fingers at former President George W. Bush for starting wars and creating a Medicare prescription drug benefit that weren't "paid for."
The 41 percent explosion in spending since 2007 wasn't "paid for" either, but media outlets weren't at all concerned about such credit card usage when they were applauding the current president and the previous Speaker of the House for doing so.
Now that the bills are coming due, these same people are not only blaming those that voted against all these now failed Keynesian measures, they're also demanding a solution that guarantees such recklessness in the future.
For the GOP to now reward such atrocious behavior by the Democrats by giving them the tax hikes they always want would ensure a repeat of this tragic fiscal nightmare every time the Left wants to "raise revenues."
That the Times ignored all this would be criminal negligence in any other industry, but is now just par for the course in journalistic opinion making.
But also at play here is the devastation that would happen to the GOP if it yielded on this issue.
Today's Republicans remember full well what happened to George H.W. Bush when he went back on his "No New Taxes" campaign pledge.
Any GOP presidential candidate that repeats this mistake will almost definitely not become this Party's nominee, and if the last man - or woman - standing after this process does, fiscally-minded conservatives will stay home next November allowing Democrats to keep the White House and the Senate while possibly winning back the House.
The folks at the Times know this just as much as every candidate standing on that stage in Iowa Thursday evening, and they're going to continue to browbeat Republicans and Tea Partiers into submission on this tax issue until they either cave or a sufficient number of Americans buys into the dishonest claim that the Right really is entirely to blame for this mess.
As proof, consider the next to last sentence in this piece: "The Republican Party has been led into its current cul-de-sac by manipulative officials who would not tell voters the truth about the government's finances."
This coming from a newspaper that has been consistently and deceitfully misleading readers about this nation's budgets for decades.
