The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Now the Feds Are Picking the Furniture
“Next Chair Is Chosen for GM”–headline, Detroit Free Press, June 10
Inheritance Dispute
The Detroit News has an interesting political angle on the Obama administration’s auto-industry bailout:
“We are only in this situation because somebody else kicked the can down the road, and that’s really an understatement,” said Austan Goolsbee, a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, on “Fox News Sunday.”
“When George Bush put money into General Motors, almost explicitly with the purpose, how many dollars do they need to stay alive until January 20th, 2009? There was no commitment to restructuring, to making these viable enterprises of any kind.”
But Keith Hennessey, Bush’s chief economic adviser, says “that Obama’s team had followed the blueprint laid out by the Bush administration”–after refusing to cooperate with the erstwhile administration during the transition:
“Despite multiple efforts to get the Obama team on board, they did not take up our proposal, nor did they suggest any modifications,” Hennessey said.
We’re in no position to say who’s right, but Obama has certainly made a trope of the idea that he “inherited” all the problems in the world from Bush. Sometimes this claim is plainly nonsensical, as when Obama, delivering the Democratic response to Dick Cheney’s May 21 address on national security, declared:
The problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility; the problem exists because of the decision to open Guantanamo in the first place.
In fact, the problem of what to do with the detainees existed even before they arrived at Guantanamo. The use of Guantanamo was the solution, and the problem has arisen anew because Obama has rejected it.
Will the Obama administration be able keep shirking responsibility by blaming everything that goes wrong with their policies on George W. Bush? Maybe. After all, Democrats thrived for decades by scapegoating Herbert Hoover.
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