VP Joe Bidens' Noble Ownership Of An Economy Republicans Crashed
This week, Vice President Joe Biden inadvertently turned the heat up on his boss - and warmed conservative hearts - when he declared it's "totally legitimate" for the 2012 presidential election to be "a referendum on Obama and Biden and the nature and state of the economy" because "we're in charge." His candor and willingness to take accountability is refreshing and even noble. After all, polling from CNN and CBS shows majorities of Americans still blame George W. Bush and the Republicans for the nation's struggling economy. And as it turns out, Biden could have simply taken a page from the Republican playbook. As it turns out, with its bogus claims that Bush "inherited a recession" and Barack Obama was responsible for the Bush economic meltdown even before taking office, Republican mythology wrongly insists America's economic woes are always the Democrats' fault.
While Vice President Biden explained the equivalent of "Bush broke it, we own it," the Republican objective since January 2009 has been to set that ownership in stone. During his admitted debt ceiling hostage-taking, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained, "I refuse to help Barack Obama get re-elected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy."
Of course, trying to evade responsibility for the nation's economic difficulties has been a central GOP strategy for years. As it turns out, George W. Bush and his amen corner continue to insist he inherited a recession from Bill Clinton, a claim then as now unsupported by the facts.
Nevertheless, even as he was ambling out of the Oval Office, President Bush in January 2009 tried to make that case that we blameless for the two recessions which occurred under his watch:
"In terms of the economy, look, I inherited a recession, I am ending on a recession. In the meantime there were 52 months of uninterrupted job growth. And I defended tax cuts when I campaigned, I helped implement tax cuts when I was President, and I will defend them after my presidency as the right course of action. And there's a fundamental philosophical debate about tax cuts. Who best can spend your money, the government or you? And I have always sided with the people on that issue."
But not the facts. After all, Bush nearly doubled the national debt, as Republican majorities in Congress voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling during his tenure. The first modern President to cut taxes during wartime, Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were the single biggest driver of red ink during the last decade and, if made permanent, will be for the next. And the meager one million jobs created during his presidency represented what the Wall Street Journal deemed the "The Worst Track Record on Record."
Then there's Bush's claim that "I inherited a recession" from Bill Clinton. As the data show, it's not true. (He did inherit a 4.2% unemployment rate and budget surpluses.) But after ten years of perpetuation by the right-wing propaganda machine, the long-ago debunked myth has remained remarkably durable.
For two terms - eight years - Bush and his apologists - blamed everything on Bill Clinton. Now they blame everything Bush and a Congress controlled by Republicans for 6 of those eight years on Democrats. This is another alarming and pathetic fake patriotism of right-wing conservatives, never be responsible, never be accountable for what they do. No movement with that mindset is fit to govern in any capacity. Republicans hate government and work very hard at making sure government doesn't work for the people. Its time to send them all back to private life where they can be full time irresponsible wackos and leave the rest of us the next twenty years to undo the damage they've done.
