Blogging from Socialized Health Care Utopia (posted by DT)

Just finishing a great long weekend in Montreal, home of socialized medicine and lots of French culture. (By the way, this is my first time here, and it's a great city).

I continue to correspond with my right wing nut job e-friends, and this weekend's topic has been the Stimulus. Basically, there is no stomach in Congress for more stimulus spending, even unemployment extensions (I read somewhere that this is the first time ever that unemployment benefits were allowed to expire when unemployment was over 7%- EVER!).

Anyway, my correspondent insists that the stimulus has been a failure because unemployment is still bad (which it certainly is), and argues along with the Right Wing Noise Machine for austerity. I tried to helpfully link to this Ezra Klein post http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/two_stimulus_talking_points_th.html, which I think is a pretty rock-solid argument that Stimulus has been important in keeping things from being worse. The response from my correspondent was :

There is so much evidence that Government spending is doing very little stimulating and just adding to our childrens debt that the case is closed.
Except,,,for a few die-hard far-left Socialist types who have tunnel vision when it comes to Government spending.
They ignore California, they ignore Greece, they ignore Europe, they ignore our deficit, they ignore our debt. It's sort of like the the guy who catches his wife in bed with another guy
and tries to convince himself she's not cheating on him.
People who want the Government to keep spending money it has to borrow, are either blinded to the danger by Liberal Ideology or they have a sinister agenda. They're not
stupid,,they must know it's hurting us, our children and our
grandchildren.
The evidence is there for all to see. It's all over America
and Europe,,they just choose to ignore it.

This guy essentially accuses liberals of Treason. I throw facts and charts at him, and he responds with this. Anyway, how about this analogy: a patient goes to the Emergency Room, close to death due to a major stroke. The doctor in the ER saves the patient. One month later, the patient is alive, but bed-ridden and requiring years of rehab. The patient complains that his treatment didn't work, because look, he's sicker than he's ever been before. The doctor points out that if he hadn't had the treatment he'd be dead.
That's stimulus- the treatment that saved us from a Second Great Depression. Unfortunately, the crash of 2007-2008 was so severe that no immediate treatment was going to bring us back to full health in just a year or two.

It continues to boggle my mind that the economy was completely ruined by conservative policies over the past 8 years, and now they're blaming the liberals who've had 18 months to clean it up. And people are buying it!