What if you spent a million dollars a day from the time of the Nativity until now? First, you’d be very, very tired (and very old) — but more importantly, you’d be less profligate than Congress was in just a single day. They spent more money than an immortal Paris Hilton on steroids, as the American Issues Project reminds us in a new video:

Politico somewhat misrepresents this rollout in its coverage and its headline, “Group counters stimulus with Jesus in TV ad”, making it sound like a religious pitch rather than just a historical reference:

After watching liberal allies of President Barack Obama flood the airwaves in support of the stimulus bill, a conservative third-party group is countering with a provocative new commercial using Jesus Christ to emphasize the scale of the $787 billion package.

The American Issues Project, which briefly aired a TV spot in last year’s presidential race, will go up on Friday with a TV spot that marks the dollars spent with the passage of time.

That makes it sound like AIP has created a “What would Jesus do?” spot, which is not at all the case.  There’s nothing provocative in that sense at all about this ad or religious at all.  They could have used Augustus Caesar’s census as a reference point as well, but fewer people would have figured out the timeline.  It shows the Mona Lisa, too; was AIP referencing the Da Vinci Code?

Politico’s Jonathan Martin does score a good point at the very end of the analysis, though:

While the stimulus may have roused an otherwise-moribund Republican Party, conservatives are late to the game. A coalition of liberal groups, led by Americans United for Change, has been airing TV and radio ads on the bill in Washington, D.C., and targeted states for a month in support of the bill.

It seems to me that this is a case of too little, too late.  We can call Congress all we want now, but the vote’s been taken and the bill signed by President Obama.  It will take a new Congress to deauthorize the spending of Porkulus in 2011.  What we need is explicit promises that electing a Republican House and Senate will stop the rest of the money from going out the door.

Update: It begins. (h/t: HA commenter Keemo)