In today's "Even a broken clock is right twice a day" news, Republican Senator Rand Paul told Fox News that Republicans should apologize to Obama for their hypocrisy over government spending.
The comments came in response to Republican Senators considering a pandemic relief bill in the trillions of dollars, after they spent eight years casting Obama as a profligate spender.
The conversation happened during a segment on the Fox News show Your World with host Neil Cavuto. Of his Republican colleagues, Paul said:
"I'm very upset with my colleagues... They should apologize now to President Obama for complaining that he was spending and borrowing too much. He was a piker compared to their borrowing that they're doing now."
"So, yes, these Republicans, they should have to apologize, and they should, by law, be forbidden from ever saying that they're fiscally conservative."
But when Paul's comments are put into context, they're anything but an endorsement of Obama. Paul's objection isn't to the hypocrisy of his colleagues so much as it is to the spending of money on pandemic relief at all.
"So, we were already running a trillion dollars short just with our normal budgetary expenses for the year. We added $3 trillion. Now they're talking about another $1 trillion to $2 trillion. We're going to borrow $5 trillion in five months."
Paul went on to say that among his biggest objections to pandemic relief is unemployment benefits.
"When you increase the benefits and you pay people, [and] the government pays them more for not working than they were getting for working, you institutionalize unemployment. Even President Obama didn't do that."
Paul made no mention of the astoundingly high rates of job loss due to the pandemic, nor the millions of dollars of May's CARES Act provisions that went to corporations instead of to the small businesses for which it was intended, or that unemployment benefits are partially funded by deductions from Americans' paychecks.
Still, on social media, people were loving that a Republican at least acknowledged his party's hypocrisy.
And many saw something deeper in Rand's comments--namely that they seem to know they're in trouble in the November elections.
But many others weren't buying anything Paul was selling.
The $3.4 trillion relief package Rand spoke about is being hotly debated in Congress right now, with 20 Republican Senators vowing to vote down any relief package, even one that were to be agreed upon between Democrats and President Trump.
