Their plan for the deficit was to make it bigger. You were there. We were all there. It was on television and everything.

Can we please, please finally stop with this nonsense that Republicans are upset by deficits? At all? Even in the slightest? "With little protest, GOP succumbs to Trump on spending" is the Washington Post headline. It includes the handful of necessary well this is a shame, but whatchagonnado quotes from blustering conservative lawmakers, all of them bullshitters who will give the same quotes to anyone within earshot and, by God, intend to.

"The mammoth spending deal provides another stark indication of the Republican Party's near-total capitulation to Trump," the Post says, which is a categorically ridiculous and nonsensical claim that ignores Republican lawmakers also doing absolutely nothing about deficits in any prior context except as periodic demand to carve up Medicare, Social Security, housing, food assistance, and anything else that does a damn bit of good to anyone of lower caste than has my own lobbyist. Donald Trump didn't retroactively turn the Republican Party into deficit bullshitters ten years ago, or twenty. Stop pretending this one dementia-suffering tax-cheating sex predator has transcendental space-time powers.

This is all the usual nonsense, and the Post could have saved some time by just pulling up one of the fifty prior stories on the same subject and replacing the names of any now-dead deficit blusterers with still-living versions. Or don’t; it’s not like it will make a difference.

The closest we come to the actual core point is from Senate Appropriations Committee chair Richard Shelby, who rather bluntly declares that we need to slash "entitlements" and if we can't do that, screw it, no point trying. Yes, there you go. We might as well have stopped there, that being the best encapsulation of the last fifty years of faked deficit nonsense from Republican big spenders. Take him at his word and go home; there’s no sense worrying about deficits at all if it’s not in the context of cutting aid to the poor.