There seems to be a common characteristic among those who follow the liberal orthodoxy, especially those in the old media. Their ideology and rabid partisanship prevent them from acknowledging, much less correcting, policy failures.
My brother, Rush, expounds the "Limbaugh theorem," which holds that President Obama studiously avoids accountability for his disastrous agenda by positioning himself, with the willing aid of the media, as an outsider -- as one who is merely observing, rather than primarily causing, these failures.
For five years, he's mostly blamed President George W. Bush. The old media never call him on it, for example, in reminding him that he promised to lead us out of this economic hellhole way before now.
They never make him answer for his reckless stimulus package, which created hardly any permanent jobs and in which little money was allocated to infrastructure as he promised. They've never called him on his irresponsible predictions, corruption and waste on Solyndra and similar green projects. Indeed, they promote the propaganda that the financial meltdown of 2008, which liberal policies caused anyway, was worse than anyone thought, that the stimulus resulted in lower unemployment than would have occurred without it and that green project failures are just growing pains in a promising new field.
But Bush isn't the only scapegoat. As Obama doesn't have to worry about blatant inconsistencies, he can blame Bush one day, Republican obstructionists the next and ATMs the next. But now I've noticed a disturbing development in his blame game saga.
He has begun also to blame uncontrollable forces in America, as if the unfolding of history, through no fault of his own, has resulted in a degeneration of economic conditions and we are simply going to have to live with the new normal -- one that lowers the bar on economic growth, employment, the labor participation rate, income, upward mobility and even, hyper-conveniently, health care.
Obama alternatively depicts himself as a proactive agent who has saved us from economic catastrophe by jacking up spending to world-record levels, as a victim of opposition forces preceding and during his term in office, and as a chief executive who is an impotent placeholder, one who is powerless to stop the inevitable forces of malaise that have insinuated themselves into the American economy but nevertheless honor-bound to mitigate the damage and retard our imminent national demise by spending us even further into bankruptcy and redistributing what little money remains to the non-rich as a matter of "fairness."
