We're Tired of Obama's Blame Game

Investor's Business Daily had a succinct editorial yesterday, tearing into Obama for the string of excuses he keeps making for the poor economy.  The purported main point of the editorial is to provide a service to the public, in that it sorts out the confusing array of excuses to date.

The list leads off, of course, with blaming former President Bush "despite the fact that the recession had pretty much bottomed out by the time Obama took office and was officially over a mere four months after he was sworn in."

Obama's list includes the Republicans for their lack of cooperation.  This falls into a standard definition found within the Democrat lexicography, that of 'bipartisanship', which to them means 'the Republicans should do as they're told'.  But I have to ask -- the Republicans should cooperate with what?  The Democrats haven't had a plan for over two years.  Instead, we should simply try to spend our way out of this economic mess with money that we don't have?  The administration encourages the Fed to print more money (as they have, but more seems to be in the offing), which addresses the enormous debt issue at the cost of devaluing and debasing our currency.  Otherwise, they want to increase our debt with China still more.

Other items on the list include the media, meaning essentially Fox News and talk radio, who haven't fallen in line with the obsequious 'thrill up my leg' main-stream media (MSM) that has been out-stripped in viewership by what the public would rather see and hear.  The Democrats have no other explanation for this other than 'people are sheep', but they are naturally reluctant to say it in public.  They have no problem saying it in private fund-raisers, though.

Businesses are on the list for not investing and not hiring, as if they should spontaneously do so without regard to the fact that the administration has no idea how we are to pull out of this slump.  We have been skimming along the edge of a recession for two years, yet business is supposed to ignore the fact that there are few buyers of their products.  This is in addition to our touting of a service economy for years now, despite the fact that at some point, shouldn't we focus on actually producing something?

Then, there is the miscellaneous, which is lumped together in the category of 'bad luck'.  This is the excuse of someone who just wants to sit back and take it.  Somehow, Bush saw a rising economy despite inheriting the Clinton recession after the dot com bust, the attacks of 11 September, and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, prior to the burst of the housing bubble.

IBD sums up the list of sorry excuses as I would:

Just to be clear, Obama's policies alone are to blame for the current sorry state of the economy.

In his first two years, Obama had free rein to get his economic agenda through a heavily Democratic Congress: An $830 billion stimulus, billions more in auto bailouts, mortgage bailouts and cash for clunkers, ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank.

None of those packages worked. They produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression. That was true before the Arab Spring, the tsunami, Europe's debt crisis and before Republicans won back the House.

At a press conference this summer, Obama said: "I'm not interested in finger-pointing."

But that's all he's been doing for months.

Wouldn't it be nice if Obama instead were to live up to his inaugural credo and start his own "era of responsibility" by admitting his role in the country's economic slump?

The comments above are essentially my own.  Read the article to do justice to the views of IBD.

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Update: Dr Milton Wolf (who turns out to be a cousin of Obama) writes in the Washington Times on this idea of a run of bad luck, and includes a quote from the great Robert Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man.  Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded – here and there, now and then – are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.  Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.  This is known as ‘bad luck.’

Dr Wolf goes on to excoriate Obama by expanding on the theme that one creates one's own luck.