Up is down, black is white, Robert Byrd is a fiscal conservative...

I don't watch much political/news TV now that the Dennis Miller show is off the air. But I do have my RePlayTV set to record the Wall Street Journal Editiorial Report off of FoxNews on Sunday mornings. It's good to watch while I eat my Sunday morning bagel with Nutella and drink about 8 cups of coffee.

So I was watching it yesterday and something made me do a double-take. They were interviewing Jim Cooper about the new congress and he was talking about how more fiscally responsible the Dems were by cutting spending, thanks to the hard work of David Obey and Robert Byrd. (The transcript is here.

Yes, that pargagon of Fiscal Responsibility, Roberty Byrd - who as Dave Barry best desribed, spent more than one billion taxpayer dollars in his relentless ongoing effort to improve West Virginia by covering the entire surface of the state with a gigantic slab of federal concrete (which will be named "The Robert Byrd Concrete Slab").

Now, my guess is that Robert Byrd's veto of the spending bill had much more to do with a desire to kick the Republicans in the balls than any newly aquired desire for fiscal disipline on his part. But the fact that a moderate Democrat can command Robert Byrd for his fiscal prudence without breaking out into laughter shows that the Republicans probably should have been a little more careful about their spending the last few years....