This is just stone amazing, but I’m with Atrios - I hope conservatives continue to pound this very drum from now through November.

In fact, I’ll help them.

Which is to say that in today’s Washington Post, Amity Shales has a piece titled, “Phil Gramm is Right.” In other words, we are whiners - because whatever’s happening in the economy now, it’s not as bad as the Great Depression:

Gas prices are ruining vacation plans and killing businesses. Many Americans have lost or are about to lose their homes to foreclosure or in distress sales. The federal government may not be talking about it much yet, but inflation plagues the country. The weak dollar is altering our everyday calculations. For many, this is not a happy summer.

Still, to liken the current moment to the Great Depression, or even the early 1980s, as Campaign Economists have, is to whine, just as Gramm said. During the Depression, people lost their homes even though they had borrowed only 10 percent of the purchase price. People losing their homes today frequently have borrowed 90 percent or more. The country approached double-digit unemployment in the early 1980s. This week, even as McCain was trying to talk his campaign past Gramm’s comments, joblessness stood at a historically modest 5.5 percent.

See??? Because bread lines aren’t snaking around city streets, everything is just fine: Quit whining.

Because the economy isn’t officially in a recession until we have two consecutive quarters of negative growth. So those higher gas bills, those vastly higher costs at the grocery store - those massively higher heating bills you’ll be seeing this winter? Shrug it off; get tough.

Stop being a whiner.

And I love how Shales says we need some “straight talk” on the economy:

The plunging stock of the government-sponsored mortgage companies reminds us that those entities urgently require restructuring. Wall Street figures and the Senate Finance Committee that Gramm used to chair are already talking about how to structure a bailout. But this task is about stopping recession, not luxuriating in it.

Social Security and Medicare also need rewriting — and Gramm put forth one of the better proposals on Social Security in the 1990s.

In short, to fix it all, we need a frank conversation about the economy.

What’s missing from this assessment?

Why - Iraq, of course. Our military adventurism in the Middle East, expected to cost some $3 trillion by the time it’s all over, if it ever is.

I cannot tell you how much I hope Republicans pursue this line of thought: That Americans who think they’re feeling a pinch are simply dreaming, and need to just buck up and deal with it because Things Have Been Worse.

You’re whining, Iraq isn’t contributing to our economic problems - what a fine world conservatives live in.

And they want to pretend liberals are elitist and out of touch?