NANCY PELOSI INSULTED REPUBLICANS? HOW? BY SAYING MORE OR LESS WHAT THEY SAY THEMSELVES?

House Republicans are whining about Nancy Pelosi's speech before the bailout vote. I don't know why. What did she say that was so very different from what Republicans have been saying about themselves since 2006?

House Republicans blamed the failure of the $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan Monday on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), saying that Pelosi had been too partisan in a floor speech prior to the vote....

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) said that Pelosi's speech "poisoned" the Republican caucus and "caused a number of members we thought we could get to go south."

"I do believe that we could have gotten there today, had it not been for the partisan speech that the Speaker gave on the floor of the House," Boehner said....

OK, this is what upset them?



Seven hundred billion dollars -- a staggering number, but only a part of the cost of the failed Bush economic policies to our country, policies that were built on budget recklessness. When President Bush took office, he inherited President Clinton's surpluses -- four years in a row, budget surpluses, on a trajectory of 5.6 trillion dollars in surplus. And with his reckless economic policies, within two years he had turned that around, and now, eight years later, the foundation of that fiscal irresponsibility, combined with an anything-goes economic policy, has taken us to where we are today....

Why is it bad for Nancy Pelosi to say that when it's an article of faith within the Republican Party that the GOP "lost its way" during its years in power -- specifically on money matters?

Here's John Fund, writing in 2005 for the house organ of the GOP right, the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

With Rep. Tom DeLay's forced departure as majority leader, Newt Gingrich says, the Republican Party stands at a crossroads as important as any it has faced since nominating Ronald Reagan for president in 1980. "It must decide if it is going to be a party that fundamentally reforms government or one that merely presides over existing institutions and spends more money," he says.

...the GOP's love affair with big government has intensified.... [The] Bush White House ... has yet to veto a single bill and [its] officials have apparently adapted the old New Deal slogan "tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect" into merely "spend and spend." ...

Here's Tom Coburn, one of the most right-wing of GOP senators, writing for the Journal editorial page this past May:

...Becoming Republicans again will require us to come to grips with what has ailed our party – namely, the triumph of big-government Republicanism and failed experiments like the K Street Project....

Regaining our brand as the party of fiscal discipline will require us to rejoin Americans in the real world of budget choices and priorities, and to leave behind the fantasyland of borrowing without limits....

And here's John McCain himself, at this year's Republican convention:

... We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us. We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger....

Yeah, the Republicans are living in a fantasyland where they're actually the budget balancers, or at least the would-be budget balancers. They think it's easy, too: just cut "waste" and we can live in a fiscally responsible low-tax paradise. That's silly. And no, that's not quite what Pelosi is getting at.

Nevertheless, the Republicans' message is that they've had no fiscal discipline. They say this all the time. (It's their way of explaining their 2006 defeats; pay no attention to that war in the corner.)

But God forbid a Democrat should say something similar.