Blame Game

Rich Lowry of National Review has a great take down of President Obama and him still blaming President Bush despite the fact that he has been in office for almost a year.

A taste:

Obama complains of having to clean up what he charmingly calls "somebody else's mess." Obama took office during a stomach-churning financial crisis, and he now brags, "We've rescued our economy from catastrophe." Who's "we"? When then‑Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke confronted Bush with the magnitude of the crisis last fall, he told them to do anything necessary to fight it.

Bush's support of the ideologically uncongenial TARP legislation, together with Bernanke's expansive actions at the Fed, rescued the system. But Obama takes the credit, while pretending Bush heedlessly let the economy burn - a tack that is in equal measures petty and dishonest.

Obama also blames Bush for the deficit, now at $1.4 trillion. Whatever his own profligacy, Bush didn't compel Obama to spend money nearly as fast as it could be printed, or to roughly double the projected debt over the next decade. Obama's motto apparently is, "Stop Bush - before he makes me spend again!"

In international forums, Obama acts as if Bush were the former president of another country, or a disgraced former leader ousted in a coup. No calumny is too much to heap on him, and no defense is ever offered. Obama might at least avoid implicitly accusing his predecessor of war crimes. He might at least credit his predecessor's, and his country's, good intentions in toppling Saddam Hussein and promoting democracy in the Middle East. No, he's incapable of it.

Obama should be grateful that Bush ordered the surge in Iraq against Obama's opposition. If he hadn't, Obama likely would have - on top of everything else - inherited a strategically central Middle Eastern country in full-scale civil war. Does Obama express any appreciation, or any humility about his own mistaken call? Of course not.