By: Jim Hoover

Now I know what die-hard conservatives will say without even looking at the chart above: you’re blaming it all on George W. again.

Conservatives do have a point.

We should blame it on the ignorance and apathy of too many American voters, interference and manipulation of the vote in key states by Rove Republicans during the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, an explicit terrorist threat that a vindictive partisan government wouldn’t consider, the unenlightened tyrannical rule of Bush Company, and the failed jingoistic ideology that the Bush administration blindly followed.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities updated the chart recently. Almost half of the public debt by 2019 is attributed to Bush tax cuts and the two Bush wars. Now, that doesn’t even consider the great recession that Republicans and Democrats helped set in motion, and it doesn’t consider a ramrodded, Bush-pushed, Republican Medicare prescription program with forbidden restraints on drug prices. All this was put on our tab too.

On the “great recession” score I would give Republicans 75% of the credit, and Democrats, 25%. After all Bill Clinton was the one who mollified laissez-faire Republicans by completely deregulating Wall Street in 1999, and as Republicans defended plutocrats almost to the death, with tax cuts and coddled treatment, the Democrats stood flat-footed while the real estate bubble built up.

Now in all fairness, after Bush fumbled the terrorist-warning ball, it was righteous to attack Afghanistan. The trouble is because of his needless attack on Iraq, the neglected Taliban came back to bite our ass when Obama became president.

So demagogic Republicans want Americans to forget that Bush-era tax cuts to the rich (and small-cuts for the middle class) and two wars – one totally ill-advised, the other fought badly – are greatly responsible for the massive debt.

And furthermore, we can lay 80% of the blame for the recession on the doorsteps of plutocrats.

Republicans – and a few Democrats — think war, tax cuts for billionaires, welfare for the rich, and more pollution are investments. Intelligent and educated people know that health, education, social services, alternative energy funding, and infrastructure are investments, not expenditures to be cut.

Hasn’t neo-conservative thinking already done enough to polarize and nearly demolish our country?