Red Ink from Red America Pols

Salon's Jake Tapper has a sharp piece about the flip-flop on budget deficits and fiscal policy among various high-profile Republicans. Could the fact that these former budget hawks now run the country's cash register?

Here's a snippet:

Dozens of top-tier Republican officials for whom reducing the deficit once seemed their raison d'?tre are now in practice completely contradicting that position. Though the sluggish economy explains some of this, many of these officials were, when it came to eliminating the national debt, as hawkish during the economic downturn of 1990-91 as they were throughout the rest of the '90s. "Frankly, I find it to be one of the most incomprehensible political events in this country over the last 25 years," former GOP Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire tells Salon. Rudman, a deficit hawk who helped found the fiscal-prudence-preaching Concord Coalition, says that he talks with former colleagues currently in the Senate to "try to get people to explain it to me and they can't. I am nonplused."

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