Rep. Foxx speaks

Now, I disagree with Republican political ideology, but even so, Rep. Virginia Foxx (NC-5) and I have mutually exclusive understandings of the world around us; I just don't get what she is thinking most of the time. Quick background: I was the campaign manager for a congressional race against her in 2006, when she voted against Katrina relief and thought the Iraq War was going swell (when fighting was at its worst). For sports fans, she was the one who made a mockery of the baseball's congressional steroid hearings when she took four random pictures of Roger Clemmons and said, "You look the same size in each of the pictures, therefore you can't have taken steroids."

So I came across this one sentence post by Andrew Sullivan:

Noam Scheiber points out the faulty financial logic of a GOP congresswoman.

My heart dropped and I thought, "What did Foxx say now." I mean, there are plenty of Republican congresswomen, but if one of them is getting negative national attention there is a heightened chance it is Foxx. The link takes you to The New Republic, and sure enough, they are criticizing Foxx and her "breathtaking" understanding of the economic meltdown:

This tidbit from the Times story on the House stimulus vote just bowls you over:

Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, said that former President George Bush’s signature tax cuts in 2001 had created years of growth but that the nation’s problems started when Democrats regained majorities in Congress in the 2006 elections.

Really? So the Democrats came into office and a housing bubble retroactively inflated and began to pop? Mortgage-backed assets worth trillions less than their stated value just magically appeared on bank balance sheets and in hedge fund portfolios?

Just to clarify, did all this happen on election night 2006, or was it not until January of 2007, when Nancy Pelosi officially became Speaker?

Ugh. Too bad that district is so gerrymandered (PVI R+16). She is an embarrassment.