ROMNEY THE LIAR CLAIMS THAT BUSH HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN!

Sometimes the sheer magnitude of the Romney campaign's lies is almost breathtaking. You wouldn't think anybody could lie as brazenly, as insultingly, as infuriatingly, as arrogantly as these people do. But now, we are being told by Willard and his Head Toad that:


1. Bush, Cheney, and Rove had NOTHING to do with the economic crisis we were confronting on 20 January 2009.


2. It is 100% Barack Obama's fault that we are still in difficulty.


3. Obama gets no credit for ANYTHING positive that has happened economically.


Greg Sargent has the story here.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom rolled out a new argument: The Bush presidency bears none of the blame at all for the economic travails of the last three years; it’s all on Obama; the current President deserves not an iota of credit for the job gains that have occurred on his watch. 


Fehrnstrom noted that the economy’s struggle throughout the last three years is “not the fault of Barack Obama’s predecessor; it’s the fault of this administration and the failure of their policies to really get this economy going again.” Fehronstrom added: “This president cannot take credit for any success on the jobs front. None at all.” 


Romney and his supporters continue to argue that we know Obama’s policies made things worse because there’s been a net job loss during his presidency. But this factors in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the aftermath of the meltdown, before those policies went into effect. They continue making this argument in every conceivable forum, and no one outside of a few pointy-headed fact-checkers raises an eyebrow. 


Fehrnstrom’s latest takes this to a new extreme, and illustrates yet again (yes, I’m repeating myself here) that the Romney campaign’s whole argument is premised on the hope that the American public has developed mass amnesia about the scale of the mess Obama inherited.

Paul Krugman has said, along similar lines:


Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are? If you've been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times...


For the Bush era didn’t just end in catastrophe; it started off badly, too. Yes, Mr. Obama’s jobs record has been disappointing — but it has been unambiguously better than Mr. Bush’s over the comparable period of his administration. 


This is especially true if you focus on private-sector jobs. Overall employment in the Obama years has been held back by mass layoffs of schoolteachers and other state and local government employees. But private-sector employment has recovered almost all the ground lost in the administration’s early months. That compares favorably with the Bush era: as of March 2004, private employment was still 2.4 million below its level when Mr. Bush took office. 


Oh, and where have those mass layoffs of schoolteachers been taking place? Largely in states controlled by the G.O.P.: 70 percent of public job losses have been either in Texas or in states where Republicans recently took control.


Let's call a spade a spade here:

1.  The economic disaster that struck in August 2007 and accelerated to catastrophic proportions by September 2008 was the DIRECT result of the Bush Administration's policies.

2.  The Bush people inherited a peaceful, prosperous nation from Bill Clinton in January 2001. By January 2009 that nation was on its death bed.

3.  The congressional Republicans have done EVERYTHING they could to sabotage the recovery. They have embraced ultra-right wing extremist policies based solely on unbending hatred for Barack Obama. They have put the interests of the American people DEAD LAST.

4. Mitt Romney's so-called "solution" to our problems--ANOTHER MASSIVE TAX CUT FOR PEOPLE LIKE HIM--would blast a monstrous hole in the nation's finances, and put this country in an economic death spiral.

5.  It is REPUBLICANS in the state governments that are helping to strangle the economy as well.

Willard wants you to forget the past. He wants to put all blame for everything on the man who's tried earnestly to repair the damage left by the Republicans and their allies. He's just following the typical right-wing pattern: Everything is the fault of the Evil Librulz. Conservatives are never to blame for ANYTHING--even when they're in charge!

As Mr. K said, how stupid do they think we are?