And from the right: Rachel Marsden - Some In Europe Wrongly Blame Bush For U.S. Debt Crisis

[pampango]

http://www.rachelmarsden.com/columns/bushdebt.htm

If online comments and e-mails from friends are any indication, the overwhelming feeling about the American debt crisis here in Europe is that if Obama is now in a position of having to raise the debt ceiling or face default, the crisis can only be traced back to George W. Bush. People across the pond are, in part, blaming Bush’s post-9/11 era military funding—yet somehow the phrase “overstretched Greek army” doesn’t exist to explain how that country managed to economically implode.

Who can argue that the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t beneficial for American business and trade? Wars are only bad for the economy if the person in charge has no idea how to parlay it into opportunity. Bush had a historical sense of what military action in the Middle East would mean. As he explained in an interview earlier this year, his father pointed out to him the conversion of the Japanese from enemy to ally—a shift that was catalyzed by war. It’s not hard to believe that Bush could envision the “long game,” but tougher to imagine the current White House occupant seeing around his Nobel Peace Prize for Being a Cool Bro to the lasting peace, prosperity and stability achieved through military victory.

Europeans also fault Bush for deregulating Wall Street—another myth. If anything, the problematic deregulation can be traced back to Clinton and Carter. Clinton’s Financial Services Modernization Act allowed previously separated investment and commercial banks to finally merge with each other in a giant deregulatory orgy. It was Texan Republican Phil Gramm and other Republicans who tried during the Clinton era to scrap Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which forced banks to give loans to people based on important criteria such as skin color rather than silly things like the ability to make payments.

Some say that Bush had a whole eight years to scrap the Carter-Clinton programs. Sure, and just imagine what the reaction would have been had he tried, absent the post-2008 meltdown context, to in the interest of imposing fiscal responsibility.

There nothing in this that is factually correct. The Bush Meltdown of 2008 is still the fault of the fault of too many mortgages to minorities, as well as policies of Carter and Clinton - and Bush deregulating Wall Street is a myth.

Oh, and wars are good for the economy if you just have a president as skilled as Bush who knew how to use war to invigorate the economy. (He also apparently was smart enough to envision the "long game" of progress in the Middle East that would come from his invasions..

It's a pretty worthless opinion piece as far as a coherent argument for any policy goes, but it is informative that the right is still peddling the same tripe that it always has. At least there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to repub spinning of history.