Time for another support group!

I love this story: Meet a new crop of anti-government House GOP candidates who also happen to be addicted to "Cash for Clunkers."

Not long ago it emerged that a number of anti-government Tea Party candidates all had the Tea Party equivalent of skeletons in their closets: They were all on the dole in one fashion or another. None of them appeared to recognize any contradiction between their perpetual railing against big government and the fact that they were being supported by Medicare, Social Security, disability checks, what have you.

Now USA Today introduces us to a new twist on this theme:

For a small group of car dealers running for Congress this year, the federal "Cash for Clunkers" program has become a political lemon. Four dealers-turned-candidates, all Republican, are under attack by opponents from both parties for railing against taxpayer bailouts less than a year after benefiting from the $3 billion program created in 2009 to boost car sales.

Who are these folks? Well, there's Scott Rigell, who recently slammed Dems for embracing big government, even though he sold 138 cars under Cash for Clunkers. There's car dealer and candidate Jim Renacci, who didn't support Cash for Clunkers but did sell 39 cars under it. He claims he only did it for his customers' sake.

These dealers-turned-candidates are defending themselves by saying that it's only customers who directly accepted government largesse in these cases. But even their Republican opponents are accusing them of hypocrisy, given that these are folks who personally profited from this big government program.

Indeed, one dealer-turned-candidate acknowledged to the paper that he had no idea how many cars he would have sold without the program. Thanks to Cash for Clunkers, though, he sold 876 cars. Time for another support group to help these folks break their big government addiction!

