Is Eric Cantor the New Herbert Hoover?

Speaking of lunatics and demagogues, one toxic player in the debt ceiling fiasco in Washington, D.C., is Virginia's Eric Cantor - believe me, he's a major embarrassment to rational, thinking Virginians. In his quest for power and shameless pandering to the worse elements of the GOP, Cantor is willing to betray the country and destroy the nation's economy. All to satisfy his own hubris and misplaced vision of himself in history. As Richard Cohen points out in a column in yesterday's Washington Post, the irony is that Cantor may well be making himself a place in history where he'll be looked at by posterity as a moron who ruined the lives of many. Here are some column excerpts:
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By happy coincidence, the name “Cantor” has exactly the same number of letters as “Hoover.” This means that the various ways the name of Herbert Hoover was once used to blame the 31st president for the Great Depression can now be revived for Eric Cantor. Thus, instead of “Hoovervilles,” those encampments of the homeless and unemployed (one was situated in New York’s Central Park), we will have Cantorvilles. And instead of “Hoover Blankets,” as newspapers used to cover the shivering homeless, we will have “Cantor Blankets.” Instead of the term “Hoover Flags,” for pockets turned inside out to signify a total lack of money, let’s run “Cantor Flags” up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
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This is Cantor’s big chance to become a historical figure — or a punching bag. He and his fellow (very) conservative Republicans stand on the brink of doing in their era what Hoover did in his. They could, just as Hoover did, stick to their ideological guns and let the economy go down the drain. They will be pure. We will be broke.
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They could insist on a balanced budget at precisely the time when economic conditions require deficit spending. On paper, everything will look good. In reality, the economy will tank. They could continue to extoll the wholly exaggerated virtues of small business and tailor tax cuts for them, and the budget would suffer and few jobs would be created. They could sink the bond market, rattle investors both domestic and foreign, make states suffer on less federal aid, weaken the dollar and convince Martians that they don’t want to come here. But they would, as did Hoover, take solace in adhering to an ideology that was proved disastrously wrong in the last century. No reason, it seems, not to do it all over again.
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This makes him the perfect and suitable choice — the No. 2 Republican in the House, after all — to become the face and the name of the coming economic debacle