Reality Check

On Fox News Sunday last weekend, Sen. Richard Shelby repeated the tired Republican party mantra that Obama is taking the country down the road to socialism. When asked by host Chris Wallace to elaborate, he stated "So, they intervene last fall in the bank crisis. No one has ever done it on that scale before."

Um, last time I checked, George Bush was president in the autumn of 2008 and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was the architect of the banking bailout (not that there's anything wrong with that - although it could have been done differently and better).

So the truth, using Shelby's definition, is that the Republicans started us down the road to socialism (not that there's anything wrong with that). But of course, the Republican party does not often let the truth get in the way of their message.

It seems that the Bush years were so bad, even for Republicans, that their communal brain has blotted out those years altogether. In their repressed-memory reality, the US government has moved seamlessly from the Clinton years to Obama, and all of our problems are down to them.

When a Bush administration aide asserted a few years ago that "we make our own reality," I guess he really meant it!