Rush Limbaugh Won't Tell You This

Here's a news scoop that Rush Limbaugh just won't tell his audience. And it comes straight from the official Congressional Record to back it up. While the Republican Party likes to play politics by portraying the Democrats as reckless spenders for efforts to pull the U.S. economy out of this deep global recession, some Republican senators actually top the list of the biggest earmark spenders of all according to the official Congressional Record report.

The Congressional Record clearly proves that Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran with $470 million dollars of earmark spending added to the Omnibus Spending Bill was #1 with earmark spending among all U.S. senators. Next up on the list of big earmark spenders was Senator Rodger Wicker with $390 million in earmark spending. In fact, of the top 10 largest earmark spenders in the U.S. senate, 10 are Republicans. Which certainly begs the issue of major league political hypocrisy on the subject.

But there might actually be a silver lining here. Most of the big earmark spenders represent poor Southern states with extremely high rates of poverty, hunger and other serious social problems such as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and West Virginia. At least these big earmark spenders are perhaps doing some measure of social good for their poverty stricken folks back home, even if someone like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal might be demagoguing on the unemployment issue just to make some political points for himself in hopes of a 2012 presidential run, damn the folks at home.

Christian charity programs such as Feed The Children feature entire families in West Virginia so poor that they are trapping rats to eat as food, calling them "nutrirats". And even affording a potato to eat is very difficult for some families. So not all earmark spending is a bad thing if it funds projects or programs that lift up some people a little higher above deep waters than all this.

Earmarks are not always bad. However, it is all of the political hypocrisy on the subject and the Washington politics of the political chant that "only Democrats are big spenders" that is getting very tiresome and worn out. The fact of the matter according to the Congressional Record facts is that many Republicans are the biggest earmark spenders that there are. But Rush Limbaugh simply lacks the honesty to tell you that fact.