Sunday, August 16, 2009

BRUCE Bartlett, the respected conservative economist, understands reality: the economic collapse was indeed a product of the Bush years. A quotation:

... the extremely poor economic performance of the Bush years really set the stage for the current recession. This is apparent when we compare Bush’s two terms to Bill Clinton’s eight years. Since both took office close to a business cycle trough and left office close to a cyclical peak, this is a reasonable comparison.

Throughout the Bush years, many conservative economists, including CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, extravagantly extolled Bush’s economic policies. As late as December 21, 2007, after the recession already began, he wrote in National Review: “the Goldilocks economy is outperforming all expectations.” In a column on May 2, 2008, almost six months into the recession, Kudlow praised Bush for having prevented a recession.

But the truth was always that the economy performed very, very badly under Bush, and the best efforts of his cheerleaders cannot change that fact because the data don’t lie.

BUT, nevermind, as Paul Krugman properly notes, even so-called centrist Republicans can fall prey to not just the usual liars like Limbaugh, Gingrich and Palin but other right wing purveyors of nonsense such as the Washington Times and the American Spectator.