On the GOPers who claim "We didn't create this mess!"

Titanic noted the GOP congressman who told Tres. Secy. Geithner "We didn't create this mess!" during the recent White House meeting over raising the debt ceiling.  James Kwak at Baseline Scenario has this reaction:

The frightening thing is, he probably believes it. When people hold certain ideological beliefs strongly enough, no amount of facts will get in their way. If you believe that the current deficit is the result of excessive government spending (passed by Democrats, even though they only controlled Congress and the White House for four out of the past thirty years*), no pile of charts will be big enough to convince you otherwise — just like if you believe that tax cuts increase tax revenues, that the deficit has produced high interest rates, or that Barack Obama was born on Mars, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise.

This is just fine if you are my daughter, who is four years old — although, actually, she admits it when she makes a mess (and helps clean it up). But if you are a legislator in the most powerful country in the world –and the one whose debt is the definitionally risk-free asset against which the yield of every other financial asset in the entire world is measured — it’s not good enough.