Saturday, March 14, 2009

Terrible Washington Post Column

In a piece entitled Obama's New Tack: Blaming Bush the writer Scott Wilson passes along the GOP talking point that Obama's statement of the obvious - that he inherited a fiscal disaster - somehow violates his pledge to move beyond recriminations.

Let's leave aside that a key Republican talking point is to try preposterously to pin our financial problems on Obama rather than Bush, and Obama is merely responding to that. In other words, that he's merely responding to lies. The more pertinent point that the column totally misses is that Obama is merely stating a fact when he says he inherited this disaster. To say that Bernie Madoff swindled people out of their money and caused many to have personal financial disasters is also a fact and not the type of recrimination that Obama pledged to avoid.

Obama pledged to move beyond recriminations based on political philosophy - matters of *opinion*. We should not be recriminating the other side merely for disagreeing with us. That was the point. Not to stop pointing out facts, misdeeds, mismanagement and crimes. That Wilson completely misses this distinction is incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. Or maybe it's the other way around.