Last year, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) — the same Joe Barton who felt the need to apologize to BP after the oil giant caused an environmental catastrophe — requested stimulus funds for NASA despite having voted against the stimulus. Last week, Barton was at it again, attending a groundbreaking “for an expansion of an Ellis County clinic made possible under the law.”

As the Dallas Morning News reported, the clinic received $250,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services for the construction work. Barton tried to thread the needle by saying that the clinic is a “worthy project”:

“As I told the crowd at the groundbreaking, I was opposed to the stimulus bill and voted against it. It has been largely wasteful and failed to produce the jobs that were promised,” Barton, R-Arlington, said in a written statement. “However, expansion of the Hope Clinic is a worthy project that deserves our support.”

The construction grant “comes in addition to more than $1.4 million the clinic has received in stimulus funds, which clinic staff said was secured with the help of Barton’s office.” In fact, Lisa Caton, director of development for the clinic, said that Barton “really did play a critical role in a lot of the things that we accomplished.”

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus will have created or saved 3.7 million jobs by September, presumably some of them for work at this very clinic. But prior to appearing at the groundbreaking, Barton called the stimulus a “boondoggle,” “a lesson in how to waste a lot of money in a hurry,” and the “most anti-competitive, anti-consumer, anti-free market piece of legislation I’ve ever seen on the House floor.”

But Barton is actually doubling down on the hypocrisy here, as the clinic will also receive money from the Affordable Care Act, the health care reform bill that Barton voted against. “There were two pieces of legislation that helped bring this about,” said Joseph Gallegos, senior vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers. “Part of this was economic stimulus funding, and the other was in the Affordable Care Act.”

At an event in Texas last week, President Obama riffed on this blatant hypocrisy on the part of the GOP. “I have to say, though, they do show up at the ribbon-cuttings for the infrastructure projects,” he noted. “They will fulminate and say it’s going to be Armageddon if we pass all this stuff, but then they’re cheesin’ and grinnin’ right there — got the shovel all ready — sending out the press releases.”

As ThinkProgress has exhaustively documented, at least 114 Republicans — more than half of the GOP caucus in Congress — is guilty of trying to take credit for projects funded by the stimulus bill that they voted against.

Earlier this month, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) was unable to identify any Republican ideas that separate today’s GOP from that of former President George W. Bush, simply saying “the vision for Republicans going forward is to produce pro-growth tax policies.” This hearkened back to Rep. Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) performance last year, when he was asked to explain the GOP’s “big idea” for job creation, and could only stammer “the big idea is to get, to get, to produce an environment where we can have job creation again.”

Yesterday, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — one of the so-called Republican “Young Guns,” who claims to be “changing the face of the Republican Party and giving Americans a road-map to get back to the American Dream” — was asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley to name an idea not already suggested by Bush that would “make a major difference in what’s going on right now.” McCarthy, after Crowley pointed out that Bush had already suggested the first thing he named, then called for rolling back the stimulus, therefore repealing tax breaks for the middle class:

CROWLEY: It does seem to me that Democrats have taken out after you all because there isn’t an idea out there that you haven’t seen either executed or proposed in the Bush years. What is that idea that’s out there that would make a major difference in what’s going on right now?

MCCARTHY: Well, fundamentally, we should look at how we spend our money. We should spend the money in government just as we do in households.

CROWLEY: But didn’t they do that in the Bush administration? I think that’s the problem here, and you know there were some disastrous Sunday appearances…

MCCARTHY: The first thing I would do, I would end the uncertainty. I would end the uncertainty for business to invest. I would invest in small business, where I would give a 20 percent deduction for the income for small business, less than 500 employees, to actually start going. I would roll back the stimulus, that’s $260 billion.

Watch it:

I’m fairly certain that Bush never did, in fact, call for raising taxes on the middle class. But I don’t think that’s the kind of difference McCarthy wants to be advertising.

According to Recovery.gov, McCarthy actually lowballed the remaining stimulus funds a bit, as there are about $289 billion that haven’t been paid out. But much of the money has already been allocated, including $65 billion in funding for tax breaks, which are intentionally going out the door a little bit at a time. Rolling back the stimulus as McCarthy suggests would necessitate rescinding these already promised tax cuts.

McCarthy also paid a lot of lip service to small businesses, without pointing out that in June he voted against a bill that provided small businesses with tax credits and set up a lending facility to get them loans amidst the credit crunch. And I guess that’s one more way in which McCarthy is employing the Bush playbook: saying one thing yet doing another.

Today, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News to discuss President Obama’s reaction to the controversy surrounding the construction of a new Islamic center near the Ground Zero site. Gingrich theorized that Obama’s wading into the debate is a “clever effort” to draw attention away from the economy, and then made the simply ludicrous claim “in many ways, more jobs have died under [Obama] than any President since Herbert Hoover”:

Maybe it was a clever effort on the President’s part to avoid talking about nine and a half percent unemployment, the worst unemployment rate — really in many ways, more jobs have died under him than any President since Hebert Hoover. So maybe this was all a clever effort to keep all of us talking about something other than how bad his record is on unemployment and the economy.

Watch it:

I have no idea in which “ways” Gingrich is fudging the data in order to make this argument, and, of course, he didn’t cite any numbers. But economist Rob Shapiro — noting that there’s “lots of finger-pointing about the economy, including the audacious claim that the fault for the high unemployment lies in the Administration’s economic policies” — took a look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data to ascertain where responsibility for jobs losses actually lies:

From December 2007 to July 2009 – the last year of the Bush second term and the first six months of the Obama presidency, before his policies could affect the economy – private sector employment crashed from 115,574,000 jobs to 107,778,000 jobs. Employment continued to fall, however, for the next six months, reaching a low of 107,107,000 jobs in December of 2009. So, out of 8,467,000 private sector jobs lost in this dismal cycle, 7,796,000 of those jobs or 92 percent were lost on the Republicans’ watch or under the sway of their policies.

Even if you start counting from the beginning of 2009, unfairly pinning losses on Obama from before he implemented a single economic measure, 4.6 million jobs were lost over the final 20 months of the Bush administration. As Ezra Klein put it, “insofar as the job losses go, it’s hard to credibly blame this White House for the vast, vast majority of them.” And it’s completely nuts to say that Obama has the worst jobs record since the Great Depression, when the administration immediately before his presided over a terrible employment plunge.

Plus, someone looking for a reprisal of Hooverism need look no further than many Congressional Republicans, who are advocating draconian spending cuts in the face of a weak economy, which will only lead to pro-cyclical drops in spending, weakening the economy further. And let’s not forget that Gingrich himself predicted an economic catastrophe would result from President Clinton’s economic policies, which instead ushered in the longest sustained period of economic growth in the nation’s history.