Posted on April 28th, 2009 by Gavin M.
Ding-dong. Hello? There’s nobody here, but what’s this thumbtacked to the tree?
John Hinderaker, Powerline:
Decade of Greed
The Congressional Republicans have produced some good charts that show what has happened to the country’s fiscal health since the Democrats took control of Congress and, worse yet, what they themselves project over the coming years. This one charges the Democrats with irresponsibility:
Fair enough. But why is it that the public sector is never charged with greed? What we see in this chart is, in fact, the insatiable hunger for money and power that characterizes Washington Democrats.1 Now that they are in control of both the legislative and executive branches, the Democrats’ greed is unchecked. You can see the result.
Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. How is it that we never before realized the rapacity of these liberal plundocrats? See if we trust them again, because there is one word for this, and that is ‘tax and spend.’ Good day.
Ding-dong. Hello? What’s this thumbtacked to the tree?
We, you know, await with ongoing good cheer the correction that Hinderaker will never make. For if done in good faith, one such correction would force another, thus forcing another, causing in short order a mea-culpalanche, a rending of garments and a growing and subsequent tearing of beards that could only end with Powerline erased in its totality from the Internet and its server dropped into one of those lakes they have ten thousand of, apparently, out there in Minnesota.
It could be replaced, as we often imagine, with a large, primary-colored message in MS Comic Sans saying ME GO BAFWOOM, over a stick-figure drawing of Hindy with his hair standing up in penciled spicules, making the sine-mouthed expression of the physically confounded. Or else the following:
WELCOME TO OWERLINE
Notice there is no “P” in it!
Please keep it that way!
-The M’g’m’t’t
Or we’ll think of something else; you know how it OMG ARLEN SPECTER TEH WHAT, NOW?
[picks up remote and turns on the Internet]
Tintin adds: There’s some additional tomfoolery with this graph. The data points have been moved to fit on the line, rather than the line being drawn to fit the data points. If you graph the line with equal units for each axis, well, surprise, surprise, the slope when the nice Republicans were in charge gets steeper. And the slope for when the evil Democrats will be wrecking the economy decreases rather than increases over time.
