Last Call

History is rewritten by the winners. Here's a serious question for the assemblage: If President Obama's record is so awful, why are the Republicans so eager to rewrite the history of what he's accomplished? Greg Sargent:

Keep an eye on this one, too, because it will also be central to GOP efforts to rewrite the history of the Obama presidency. In his big Wall Street Journal Op ed piece today attacking Obama’s campaign documentary and minimizing the magnitude of the economic crisis Obama inherited, Karl Rove also claims the killing of Osama Bin Laden was no big deal.

Yeah, stop for a sec. Rewind. Play back. The crisis was minimal, so it was really President Obama's unnecessary efforts at government intervention that "created" the financial crisis and ramped up unemployment. And as far as our late former Saudi ally is concerned, well Big Dog would have made that call too, Rove says. How can this President possibly take any credit for that?

 Rove goes on to say that the President has been lying about everything: the stimulus, health care reform and his mother's battle with insurance companies and cancer, Afghanistan, Iran, and of course the death of bin Laden. But hold on, I thought the President hadn't accomplished anything, that he sat on his hands all day and campaigned for re-election for the last several years. Basic stuff is now disappearing down the memory hole, like the lies that Mitt Romney regularly tells about the President's record.

 Now we're seeing a concerted effort to define the Obama administration as the source of the financial crisis. Romney of course said yesterday that it was President Bush and his SecTreas, Hank Paulson, who "prevented another Great Depression" while the FOX News crew keeps insisting that the bank bailout was all President Obama's idea, equating the stimulus to the bailout. They're not the same. The GOP wants it to be.

They want to rewrite history to say that the financial meltdown would have been fixed by Bush except Obama came in and screwed everything up and made it worse. The fact that Bush's policies helped create the crisis in the first place is irrelevant to this President's re-election. So yes, the race is now on to define the "crisis" as only existing from January 20, 2009 and on. Sargent himself adds this:

This comical level of dissembling and mendacity is to be expected from Rove. But it’s a bit surprising that the Journal’s editors either didn’t think to check such an obviously ridiculous representation of Clinton’s quote, or worse, that they just waved Rove’s dishonesty through in the full knowledge of what Clinton had actually said.

You haven't been paying much attention to how this works much, have you Greg? Spreading mendacious dishonesty is what Karl Rove does professionally.