Paul Krugman provided the following graph of total public and private debt, which I altered with red with the presidents at the different times. The only Republican who doesn’t look too bad is George H. W. Bush, who was an old-fashioned conservative. What it shows, as I’ve discussed before, is that modern Republicans are not economically conservative. In general, I don’t care about the budget deficit. But Republicans supposedly do. I’ve come to the conclusion that Republicans are not hypocritical; they are good old-fashioned 1984 styled authoritarians who care about one thing and one thing only: power for its own sake. And as a country, we really need to wake up to this.