Democrats have traditionally been called tax-and-spenders and weak on security by the right wing. The tax-and-spend meme goes back a ways; I remember hearing it especially in the Reagan 80’s. It’s always been a lie, easily proved. Just go to your local library, like I did, and look up the budgets during those years. You’ll find that out of the eight budget years during the Reagan administration, the Democratic-run Congress passed budget bills that were less than what Reagan had called for–in seven out of eight years. Had Democrats simply spent what Reagan asked for, we would have spent more; how that makes Democrats high spenders is not exactly explained by the right-wing rhetoric.

But today we see the conservative Reality Distortion Field™ even more strongly in play. For six years we suffered unchecked excessive porkbarrel orgies passed by the Republican-controlled Congress, not once vetoed by Bush for overspending (he only vetoed one bill, and it was over stem cell research). The Clinton surplus was destroyed right out of the gate by Bush and his Congress, and the deficit has been back up to Reagan-era levels ever since.

And yet, after all of this, Bush has the unmitigated gall to call the Democrats big spenders, whipping out the old, tired, but ultimately effective (thanks to that damned Liberal Media™!) canard about tax-and-spending Democrats:

President Bush warned Congress on Saturday that he will use his veto power to stop runaway government spending.

“The American people do not want to return to the days of tax-and-spend policies,” Bush said in his radio address.

The House passed a $37 billion budget for the Homeland Security Department on Friday, but Republicans rallied enough votes to uphold a promised veto from Bush.

Six years. For six years Republicans in Congress spent more than any other Congress in history. More pork-barrel bills and amendments than ever before. And the president, who could have checked it with veto threats, never did so. Bill after expensive pork-laden bill, Bush instead signed off on them, all of them–reserving his sole veto for a partisan issue to satisfy the hard-core religious right. Bush and the Republican Congress overspent by hundreds of billions of dollars, with several billion taxpayer dollars lost through corruption and bad accounting in Iraq alone.

But maybe Democrats deserve to be called tax-and-spenders today; what kind of pork did they heap on to the latest bill?

The spending bill passed 268 to 150. It calls for $2.1 billion in spending, or 6 percent, above the president’s request and 14 percent more than in the current fiscal year.

The bill would double the president’s financing request for state antiterrorism grants to $550 million and set aside $400 million in grants for port security, $190 million more than the president proposed.

Yep, those damned Democrats have gone and blown a couple billion dollars on antiterrorism and port security funding. You know, the kind of stuff that the 9/11 commission urged that we spend, and the Bush administration and congressional conservatives have blocked for years. Because they’re strong on defense. Democrats are tax-and-spenders because they oppose huge, multi-trillion dollar giveaways to the super-rich and to profit-heavy corporations, and they’re for spending a few hundred million more on minimally funding local governments’ ability to respond to terrorist attacks and other disasters. Because they’re weak on defense. The bastards!

But if you look closer, you’ll see a stronger underlying reason for Bush’s opposition:

Perhaps the most hotly contested part of the bill is a requirement that department contractors pay their employees at least the local prevailing wage. The provision, part of broader Democratic efforts to enact legislation being pushed by unions, would allow the president to waive so-called Davis-Bacon restrictions only in times of national emergency.

You’ve probably heard of this provision before. Remember after Katrina, when Bush and Republicans poured billions of dollars into “rebuilding” New Orleans, but mostly just pumped the money into the pockets of their campaign contributors? At the same time, Bush and the Republicans were trying to short-change hired labor–the same people they were supposedly trying to uplift. You see, the corporations that were getting huge, no-bid contracts wanted to pad their own pockets by using emergency provisions to pay less than market wages for labor.

Well, those nasty, middle-class-hating Democrats are at it again, trying to make it so the government funding does not allow people receiving the funds to pay below-market wages. And that’s the main reason Bush is against the bill. Forget that the workers deserve to be paid a fair wage–and that’s exactly what it is, a fair, “local prevailing wage.” Because it’s pro-worker, that means it’s pro-union, and therefore it must be an evil liberal plot.

Maybe if the Democrats had laden the bill with actual pork, Bush would have signed the bill out of sheer habit.