Gleeful Republican Idiots: the WSJ's Very Own Stephen Moore

Last Friday, Stephen Moore, member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, appeared--again!--on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. I consider Stephen Moore as a fairly typical pro-establishment, pro-corporate rule Republican, only with a much higher ability to be annoying than the average representative of that group, which makes Moore the recipient of my very own first Gleeful Idiot Award.

In quick succession, Moore stated that Americans don't like "Obamacare" because it is a "government takeover" of the system. Challenged by host Bill Maher and guest Rachel Maddow about that claim (which was selected by Politifact as Lie of the Year in 2010), he corrected himself and said that well, it is leading to government health care.

Then he forcefully denied that the individual mandate requirement was originally a Republican idea, until Maddow pointed out to him that it was part of the Republican's response to Bill (and Hillary) Clinton's health care reform plan in 1994.

Next, Moore expressed his support for President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, and idea which deserved all the ridicule it ever got, and continues to get to this day.

The last idiotic statement he made before I stopped keeping score of the idiotic things Moore said, all in the space of roughly 25 minutes, was the claim that the Reagan tax cuts benefited the people at the bottom more than the people at the top, which Maddow promptly debunked, WITH FACTS (the number of poor increased under President Reagan, and the tax cuts overwhelmingly favored the top 1% of earners, with measly benefits for average Americans--well-below inflation). David Stockman, former Budget Office Director-under Ronald Reagan,no less--offered his own rebuttal to Moore on the goodness of Reagan's tax cuts, saying that the United States has yet to recover from the disastrous deficit consequences they caused.

It looks like the number of "expert economists" who still believe the kind of crackpot ideas that Stephen Moore believes in is so small that the WSJ had to ask, well... Stephen Moore himself to be on the WSJ's Editorial Board. Keep that in mind when anyone recommends to you a "good read" from the WSJ, particularly if penned by Stephen Moore.