Romney stumbles on a pretty good point

Mitt Romney, speaking to Fox News, just before fleeing Poland:

I realize that there will be some in the Fourth Estate, or whichever estate, who are far more interested in finding something to write about that is unrelated to the economy, to geopolitics, to the threat of war, to the reality of conflict in Afghanistan today, to a nuclearization of Iran. They’ll instead try and find anything else to divert from the fact that these last four years have been tough years for our country.

In a way I agree with Romney. It seems to me that political journalists should be investing a greater percentage of their everyday coverage to pounding reminders of just how shockingly awful the Bush administration was; those eight, horrifying years that reversed a surplus, detonated the debt, catered to the affluent, introduced stagnated middle-class incomes, created virtually no new jobs, diplomatically alienated the world, launched an insanely fatuous invasion of the wrong country ... and ... whew ... almost done ... the Bush administration was so dizzyingly busy with all this it couldn't be bothered to notice that our entire financial structure was about to collapse in a devastating pile of rubble, which would then be dropped in President Obama's lap, leading to the painfully undeniable "fact that these last four years have been tough years for our country."

Which rather makes sense, don't you think? It's all part of the same story; one cannot intelligently ponder these "four years" without pondering the totality and inescapable continuity of the twelve. Barack Obama didn't waltz into the Oval Office in 2009 and slash 7,000 points from the Dow and throw several million poeople out of work. No, that was done for him--by the very kind of economic urinating and neoconservative crapping on us that Mitt Romney wishes to reintroduce.

And he's right. We should ponder the history of it all, and far more often.

Comments

[AnneJ]

It wasn't just the previous 8 years of Bush/Cheney. It was the previous three decades of trickle on economics and deregulation of the banking sector that got us to where we are today. And yet people whether they were for or against Obama in 2008 expected him to wave a magic wand and make all the bad stuff go away....

[millekat]

Sounding like a child who spots the lacuna in her favorite bedtime story:

"You left out Katrina!"

[melsouza]

And every time someone DOES want to talk about "geopolitics, the threat of war....Afghanistan...the economy...etc." what does Romney do? He runs with his tail between his legs. He's as forthcoming about these subjects as he is about his tax returns. If a reporter dare ask Romney any substantive question, he dodges. It's an elliptical situation, really. Romney avoids answering questions from the Press on substantive issues so he can then criticize the Press for not asking about substantive issues. What is your policy on Afghanistan, Mr. Romney? We are studying the issue...What is your Iran policy, Mr. Romney? We are studying the issue..and so on and so forth...