The Republicans have turned to Herbert Hoover for advice on Obama’s economic recovery plan.

Defying all economic sense since the Great Depression, they’ve dusted off Hoover’s ruinous policies and are now presenting them as fiscal sense.

“Government can’t fix this,” said John Boehner on Meet the Press. “It’s a lot of spending that I just don’t think will work.”

John McCain was reading from the same script to Chris Wallace on Fox. “We're going to lay an additional $2 trillion of debt on future Americans,” he said. “We've got to eliminate the unnecessary spending."

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who gave the Republican response to Obama’s radio address Saturday, stressed “holding the line on spending” and “balancing the budget.”

To follow this Republican advice would send the economy straight into a depression.

The private sector is shedding jobs by the thousands every day. But Republicans would rather have people be unemployed by the private sector than employed by the public sector. (Rep. Rodgers insisted that every single job that the economic recovery plan creates be in the private sector.)

Only the federal government has the resources to stave off the disaster that will surely befall us if we let the free market take us further over the cliff.

The Republicans keep reiterating Hooverisms.

Why?

Because they’re ideologically bankrupt.

And because worried that Obama’s stimulus may actually work. And they don’t want him—or the Democrats—to get the credit.

As Rush Limbaugh put it on January 23, “Obama’s plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party, in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule.”

Limbaugh’s been upfront, saying, “I hope he fails.”

Republican leaders in Congress are not quite that crude.

But they mean the same thing.