Maddow on Republicans burying tax report: 'Don’t like the data? Get rid of the data'

On Friday night's edition of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow discussed the Republicans on Capitol Hill's attempt to bury a report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) that thoroughly debunked one of the Republican Party's most sacred tenets, that tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs and are good for the economy.

That belief, known as "trickle down economics" could be called the central pillar of Republican economic policy, and yet, the non-partisan CRS study's results have been pulled from the organization's website at Republicans' behest.

Maddow began the clip by discussing former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA)'s last campaign rally of the week, outside Cincinnati, Ohio, a "mega-rally" featuring "nearly 100 governors, senators, congressmen, mayors...and other GOP luminaries."

Top stars at the rally featured a brace of top-line personnel from the George W. Bush administration, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chow, former head of Homeland Security, ex-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge (R) and more.

"Mitt Romney," Maddow said, "Change you can believe in...if you really liked George W. Bush and if you like the current Republican Congress."

"Who cast this thing, the Democrats?" she asked.

One of the reasons Americans are glad the Bush years are over, Maddow said, is not just the war in Iraq, warrantless wiretapping or torture, but also the Bush administration's tendency to just "disappear" information that did not support its assertions.

In 2003, the State Department issued its annual report on global terrorism. When it was time to issue another report for 2004, the State Department had in fact found that Bush administration policies not only hadn't reduced terror attacks in the world but had driven them up to their highest point in two decades, the Bush administration's answer was to stop publishing an annual terrorism report at all.

"The Bush administration had a habit of this," she said. "Don't like the data? Get rid of the data."

Congressional Republicans have opted for a similar means of dealing with a report out from the Congressional Research Service, the organization charged with getting Congress the most accurate information on any topic that it can, free of partisan spin or agendas. The CRS is who the elected men and women of the federal government count on to help them do their job by bringing them the unvarnished facts on any given topic before the Congress.

Nonetheless, the CRS came under immediate attack by Republicans, who demanded that it withdraw the report, citing an inappropriate "tone." The CRS has complied and withdrawn the report, but it is still available at the Senate Democrats' own site.

Watch the video, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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