by Mark Rhoads
Vice President Joe Biden has decided to start calling this the "Bush Recession" in a lame attempt to divert attention from the fact that the 2009 Stimulus Bill did not succeed in creating new private sector jobs but only maybe "saved" some public sector jobs that states could no longer pay for. As of today, according the AP, the unemployment rate as a whole continues to hold at 9.5 percent. It might be higher in Illinois but I don't have the state breakdown.
Nationwide the number of people continuing to claim unemployment benefits rose by 81,000 in June to 4.57 million. That doesn't include an additional 3.67 million of the unemployed that are receiving extended benefits paid for by the federal government. That also does not include millions of people who are out of work but have become too discouraged to continue looking so they are not counted as part of the labor force that is looking for work.
For about a half century the Democrats always blamed Herbert Hoover for everything bad in the world. They never did explain what exactly Hoover was supposed to do in 1929 under the limited federal laws and regulations of that year to stop stock speculators from buying stocks on margin. But it did not matter, Hoover was to blame.
Hoover left office 77 years ago and he died 46 years ago but that did not stop Jimmy Carter from blaming Hoover for all the nation's problems when he first ran for President in 1976 at a time when Hoover had already been dead for 12 years. Jimmy always was a classy guy.
Democrats never take the blame for anything if they can blame a dead or out of office Repubican instead. Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress since January 2007 and according to the Natioinal Bureau of Economic Research, the current recession started in December 2007. Democrats such as Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) promoted lending to borrowers who were bad credit risks and never took responsibily for his contribution to collapsing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
George W. Bush was still president 9 months after the recession officially began when the Wall Street financial meltdown happened and Democrats still controlled the Congress. Yet Democrats refuse to acknowlege they have any share of the blame for their part in policies that helped cause the metldown when they controlled Congress.
Bush left office 19 moths ago and he did not pass or sign the wasteful sitmulus bill or the massive spending and debt that Obama and Democrats in Congress have authorized that puts the country in danger of a second big dip to the current recession and choking off any short-term hope of recovery.
But they will continue to blame George W. Bush anyway for everything bad because it looks like bad form to keep blaming Herbert Hoover when he has been dead for 46 years.
But we cannot be sure that Biden will not blame Herbert Hoover anyway even in his grave. After all, it was Joe Biden who said to NBC during the 2008 campaign that Herbert Hoover "went on national television" to explain the 1929 stock market crash. It was an odd statement on Biden's understanding of modern American history since national television did not exist in 1929 and would not even be demonstrated in experimental formats until the 1939 World's Fair in New York and national networks were not working until 1949.
But who cares about real history when it is so much more convenient if you can make up your own? Barack Obama told Terry Moore of ABC News last year that Emperor Hirohito personally surrendered to Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1945 to end World War II. That "Obama fact" was major news to both US and Japanese historians and news photographers who documented every detail of the low-level delegation from Japan that surrendered on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 15, 1945. Hirohito and MacArthur did meet a month later but no paper was ever signed by Hirohito. No matter, if Obama thinks it happened then it must be so.
