“Budget reconciliation killed my dolly!”

Despite his ignominious–and immensely satisfying–defeat in 2006, Rick Santorum refused to go quietly into the good night, choosing instead to inflict his insane, right-wing looking-glass perspectives on the poor citizens of Pennsylvania. Why anyone gives a rat’s puckered ass what Senator Man-on-Dog has to say about health care reform is beyond me, but somebody gave him air time:

SANTORUM: What the Democrats have done is to try to short-circuit the process on a major piece of legislation. This has never been done before. We have never seen a major, long-term, policy prescription, whether it’s Medicare, or go back throughout history and look at all the major pieces of legislation, none of them have ever been passed using this procedure. … This is truly an abomination.

Except, unsurprisingly, this is a blatant Republican lie. Budget reconciliation has been used at least 20 times over the past 30 years. What’s more, Little Ricky knows this full well since, as Ali Frick at Think Progress points out, he was the Republican Party’s standard bearer for budget reconciliation when it served the party’s interests in wiping out welfare:

Santorum himself was the Senate Republicans’ point man in trying to push welfare reform through budget reconciliation in 1995, including it in a budget then-President Clinton opposed, as the Washington Post reported on Nov. 11, 1995:

But the welfare measures will be part of the overall reconciliation bill that Clinton has said he will veto.

Welfare reform may become a free-standing bill to be passed separately from the reconciliation measure. "This is a bill the president has absolutely no reason not to sign," said Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who acted as an intermediary in negotiations between the House and Senate on welfare.

The polished effortlessness with which Republicans lie in the face of cold, hard truths is fairly remarkable.  Global warming? Doesn’t exist because carbon dioxide is found in nature. Waterboarding?  It’s a college prank, not even remotely considered "torture".  Gay marriage?  Why, there absolutely is proof that the world will explode into a gazillion shards if homosexuals are allowed to tie the knot. No matter if there is evidence on the record that Republicans have used budget reconciliation to get legislation passed.  Unblinking, they’ll just claim there is no evidence on the record.

Did we expect anything less from the intellect who gave us "written in Islamic"?