Everyone knows that only Republicans are fiscally conservative. There's only one thing: It's not true.

I do not understand how this meme prevails. It's a study in PR and propaganda to rival any other. There may have been a time when Republicans believed in fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets, but that time has long passed.

The reality is that the debt explosion that Republicans today rail about began in 1981 with their, now mythically reinvented hero, Ronald Reagan. Here are the facts: Deficits remained relatively flat with Gerald Ford (R) and Jimmy Carter (D). But they ballooned with Reagan (R), $85 billion to $255 billion, and H.W. Bush (R), $255 billion to a peak of $432 billion. With Clinton (D), it decreased all they way back to $18 billion at the end of his term, when under another Republican president, G.W. Bush, with the full support of a Republican congress, it skyrocketed from Clinton's $18 billion to $1.017 trillion in 2008. As David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director, recently wrote in The New York Times, the “debt explosion resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace … of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.”

As Republicans on the one hand decry our nation’s enormous deficit, successfully blaming Democrats I might add, they also forced Obama to cave on extending the Bush tax cuts, even though the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report that the revenue loss from the Bush tax cuts accounts for about a quarter of the current federal deficit, and if extended, those cuts will be responsible for 54 percent of the yearly deficit. According to the Pew Economic Policy Group, the extension of the Bush tax cuts will cost $3.1 trillion over ten years, with nearly all of the benefits going to the richest 1 percent, those with incomes of more than $500,000 a year.

Yet, somehow, Republicans still manage to own the debate, successfully making fiscal responsibility part of their party platform, campaign slogan and self-professed philosophy - And people buy it - Polls suggest voters are angry about the deficits and are blaming the Democrats. Go figure.

The GOP and right-wing die-hards have hated Obama from the start. Now, just about everyone, left and right, is at least annoyed with him, and more likely, fed up.

No longer able to compete on substance, the republicans are falling back to their old stand by: Guns, God, and Gays.

When all else fails, do your best to tap into base fears and paranoia. Cheney is everywhere lately telling anybody who will listen that we are "less safe" (why does anyone still believe a single word out this man's mouth?).

The Vermont Equal Rights Decision appears to be a rallying cry for right-wing extremists.

What is this, 2004? The republicans have officially run out of ideas.

Republicans obviously have not cornered the market on cynicism and hypocrisy in politics. I certainly wouldn't be foolish enough to state that Democrats or liberals or other parties are perfect. But over the last couple of decades the GOP has simply gone over the deep end.

A couple of examples include the "Patriot Act" and probably the most insidious "No child left behind." A few other examples follow:

Support the Troops: They embrace slogans like "Support the Troops" and then treat soldiers like crap in reality, failing to provide adequate armor, facilities, food, and so on. Remember Walter Reed, keeping troops in IRAQ indefinitely (in violation of both the 2008 Defense Appropriations Act and the 2008 Defense Authorization Act), inadequate help and support for soldiers suffering from war-related psychological injuries, the whole Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch affairs, and the list goes on.

Big Government: This is a good one. Republicans tell us they are against "Big Government" and against "Government Spending" - things that sound really good to a lot of Americans. But Republicans have become the party of big government now. Government grew faster in two years of Bush than it did in all eight of Clinton. Spending has been out of control under Republican leadership. They want to insinuate the federal government in all manner of peoples lives. It's Republicans who want to tell us all how to live, who to marry, who to sleep with, what to do with our bodies, and what god we should pray to. How can they cry for less government control and then insist on enforcing control in areas of peoples' lives the government should have no part of?

Ethics and Corruption: There are plenty of individual cases of corruption and illegal activies from all sides. The big difference is, it always seems to be the Republicans who love to sanctimoniously lecture everyone else about ethics and morality. They tell us they are the party to fix corruption in government, but then overlook some of the worst offenders from their own party. The list here is so long, there's no way I can put it in a single blog post. You might want to check out this site. Perhaps a good proxy for this category of hypocrisy would be the Department of Justice's partisan abuses of power:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey named a prosecutor yesterday [Septempber 29, 2008] to investigate whether former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, other Bush administration officials or Republicans in Congress should face criminal charges in the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

The above are just a few examples, but this is I think one of the biggest areas the GOP must address. Here's what Forbes writer Tom Coburn says in an article today:

The election also was a measure not just of the excellence of Obama's field operation but of the level of disgust with a decade of Republican hypocrisy. Voters expect Democrats to talk the conservative talk and backtrack, but they expect Republicans to do what they say in terms of enacting conservative policies. In many respects, the 2008 election was a continuation of the 2006 punishment voters exacted on Republicans who were saying one thing but doing another.

Republicans recently are all about do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do. They often live in the biggest glass house, yet throw the largest stones. This kind of "kissing babies" politics is nothing new, but the GOP needs to clean it up. They need to have their actions match their words much more closely if they expect anyone but the hardcore to listen to them and, more importantly for them, to vote for them. The Republican brand rests in the balance.