It seems that the President, in pointing out the myriad disasters unfolding around us that are the inescapably direct result of Bush and his ideology, an act akin to commenting on the wetness of water, crossed some imaginary line for those on the Right.  You see, since they unanimously blame Democrats for everything bad that’s happened since Adam and Eve rode their dinosaurs to Applebee’s, they naturally would prefer that Democrats do likewise.  Just as a child prefers to “win” at tic tac toe.  And their reaction, when they lose, is the same.  Run to Mommy, crying.

Kissing the boo-boo, Mommy Wilson points out with obvious chagrin that Obama’s approval ratings “remain” lamentably high and rounds them downward just a bit, for good measure. (Has anyone noticed that a modifier indicating its fleeting nature accompanies every mention of Obama’s approval rating?  Did they say that about Bush in his first term?  Ever?)  Wilson locates an obscure midwestern professor to back up Ari’s claims about the problematic nature of the President talking, out of turn,  about the blueness of the sky, not because no one capable of fogging a mirror would still believe a word Bush’s most celebrated liar said, but because it makes his one-source wheelbarrow of Legacy Project horseshit, delivered fresh, look nicer on the front page.

Of course, lest the story appear too one-sided, in addition to being fact-free, from a non-credible source, and having no conceivable news hook, Wilson, showing us he’s different from the boys at Politico, deigns to dial up the “liberal leaning” Brookings Institution, and apparently because Michael O’Hanlon couldn’t come to the phone, ended up talking to Thomas  Mann.  That call was disappointing.  Mann pointed out that since Republicans were daily blaming Obama for things that happened last fall, and even summer, it might be less than surprising that Obama was pushing back, although Wilson, unimpressed, hung up before Mann could go on too much about it.  He also dutifully phoned Rahm Emanuel, who wasn’t buying his story either, so also got cut off quickly and summarily.  Luckily, Wilson’s “researcher” (they actually identified the poor thing, but I won’t, out of compassion…) was able to come up with an old quote from fair and balanced Chris Wallace blaming Obama for the stock market collapse, and Eric Cantor was at the ready to finish the story with a resounding paean to the “now,” instead of the less advantageous “then.”  Whew.  That was close.

What Wilson is doing here, besides unremarkably assuming his readers are cretins, is the opposite of what his job is, of course, and it’s this winking amnesia and widespread refusal to analyze honestly what policy failures caused this mess that allow the likes of Ari Fleischer to roam free, blaming others for their failures hither and yon.  And the real story, that bipartisan deregulation and corruption that Bush greatly exacerbated, is being systematically buried under an organized rollout of lies and backdating, is nowhere near as interesting, much less valuable, to an oleaginous gasbag like Wilson as a lengthy, empathetic analysis of hurt Republican feelings.

The credulity required to accept that Obama’s use of the word “inherit” with regard to the economy as some horrid, overly “partisan”  breach of protocol, from the man who told us to “watch what we say… and do” about his old boss, lies somewhere beyond my ability to comprehend.  But it certainly explains a lot about how we ended up where we are.  We stepped in a steaming pile of Wapoo.