Why does the GOP want America to fail?

It's no secret that the GOP in Congress and the Senate are rooting for the American economy to get worse in the next few years, for more banks to collapse, for you, dear reader, to lose your job and perhaps your house: after all, they see America's failure as their meal ticket. If things get worse for you, they hope that things will get better for them. And so they tried desperately to torpedo Obama's stimulus package last week, to characterize it as "wasteful spending" and press for a counter-productive package that substituted non-stimulative tax cuts for the government spending that is needed to stem the tide of job losses and get the nation working again. The national GOP presented a unified front, save for three pragmatic GOP Senators... who just coincidentally hail from the largely Democratic Northeast and will be facing their constituents in Senatorial elections come 2010.

But as the New York Times reports, as soon as you focus on people who are actually affected by the economy, whose jobs depend on a recovery, things change. Republican governors, for instance, are far more pragmatic and far more supportive of the bill than their Congressional counterparts:

Governors, unlike members of Congress, have to balance their budgets each year. And that requires compromise with state legislators, including Democrats, as well as more openness to the occasional state tax increase and to deficit-spending from Washington.

Across the country, from California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger to Florida’s Charlie Crist and New England’s Jim Douglas in Vermont and M. Jodi Rell in Connecticut, Republican governors showed in the stimulus debate that they could be allies with Mr. Obama even as Congressional Republicans spurned him.

GOP governors in many ways find themselves in the same position as President Obama: they are responsible for shepherding a frightened population in a time of economic turmoil. They don't have the luxury of working to further undermine our economy in the hopes that voters will forget that it is they who brought us to the point where we are today, and in their collective amnesia, put them back in office in retaliation.

The shamelessness and hypocrisy of Congressional Republicans knows no bounds. After eight years of reckless deficits totaling some five trillion dollars, they want us to believe that they oppose a needed stimulus bill because it spends one sixth as much trying to dig us out of the economic mess they left us in.

Verily I say unto you: Congressional Republicans are the pedophile priests of government spending.