Are you ready from some ultra-sheer audacity? This headline, and concomitant story, comes from the web site of the Dallas Morning News: Bush, GOP take credit for economic surge. Can you believe the effrontery of those tax cutters?

The article began:

WASHINGTON – The burst of unexpectedly good economic news Thursday set off a new round of political bickering that is destined to persist right up to Election Day, a year away.

The Administration has been forecasting this kind of expansion for a while, and this was hardly unexpected. On the 20th of this month, I wrote:

According to several reports, analysts are claiming a 7-percent growth rate for the 3rd quarter of this year. This is not a “Bush recession.” This is not a “sluggish economy.” (The growth rate for 1999 was 4.2-percent.)

Cut taxes, the economy will rise. Who ended the Carter malaise? President Ronald Reagan. Who is ending the Clinton-Bin Laden malaise? President George W. Bush.

The President and the Congressional Republicans, with some few likeminded Dems, deserve the credit. Their policies have enabled the American people to crawl from stagnation. But the Dems and their media stooges cannot let credit go where credit is due. Mission One: Create Doubt. Mission Two: Smile and say you did it despite the GOP.

From the Morning News article:

For President Bush and fellow Republicans, the fastest economic growth in nearly 20 years was hailed as proof that his tax-cut policy was finally boosting a stagnant economy.

For Democrats complaining about job losses and challenging the president’s bid for re-election, the upbeat report threatened one of their key election-year premises: The president has made a bad economy worse.

Actually, the Dems’ premise was that the President took a robust economy anemic.

And speaking of anemic, how’s this from candidate Joe Lieberman?

“While today’s news is encouraging, it does not change the fact that the president has turned Main Street into a one-way street going in the wrong direction,” said Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the nine Democrats seeking the party’s presidential nomination.

“We’ve lost more than 3 million jobs, 3 million people have fallen into poverty, the budget deficit and national debt are growing, health care and college tuition costs are escalating,” he said.
“And this president still has no real plan to sustain this growth, translate it into jobs and rebuild a strong middle class.”

They even let candidate Howie Dean rant for print:

Still another Democratic contender, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, made clear the nation’s economic vitality depended in large part on the restoration of jobs and the creation of new ones.

“President Bush has compiled the worst economic record since the Great Depression,” Dr. Dean said, “and it is going to take a lot more than one quarter of growth to clean it up.”

Yes, it’s “Dr. Dean”! Like in the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein, the lab assistant (”pronounced “Eye-gore”) hands him an abnormal brain and the good doctor creates a freak. And that’s his campaign. But I’m digressing.

Jobs, jobs, jobs. Bipartisan political analyst Charlie Cookagrees:

“His tax cuts may turn the broader economy around,” Mr. Cook suggested. “But if it doesn’t do anything to create jobs and put some of these people back to work, it doesn’t get the same political bang.”

Yes, it’s hard to vote for a President if you feel he cost you your job. It’s easier to vote for a President if he hasn’t. Chew on that.

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Miranda, the conservative teenaged Texas blogger, is back with her Right Winged blog after a month of computer purgatory. Check out her stuff.