A POST ABOUT A LESS AMUSING BLOATED EVIL REPUBLICAN ... AND HIS EX-BOSS

Arianna Huffington was on Rachel Maddow's show tonight trying to get us all to stop talking so much about Rush Limbaugh. I understand why she's having trouble -- right now, talking about Limbaugh, and the Republicans who feel the need to grovel before him, is really, really fun. But Huffington has a point. Here's part of what she wrote this afternoon before her appearance; I'm not in complete agreement with it, but it's worth reading:

...in truth, Rush is just a massive shiny object that distracts our attention from the real intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party, Karl Rove.

At the same time [Rahm] Emanuel was on CBS anointing Limbaugh top dog, over on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos Rove was demonstrating why he is the real force and the real danger in the wounded-but-still-destructive GOP.

... Rove has studied his Orwell and understands that "who controls the past, controls the future."

That's why we saw Rove lambasting Obama's budget deficit, conveniently skipping over the nearly $1.6 trillion added to the deficit by the administration he helped guide. Not one word about the role the massive tax cuts for the rich he championed played in creating the current economic crisis. Not a peep about the deregulation of Wall Street he held so dear.

Indeed, he tried to lay the Bush administration's fiscal legacy at the feet of "two wars, 9/11, and a recession handed to us by the previous administration."

Notice the chutzpah of sidestepping any accountability for the last eight years. And acting as if the Iraq war just happened -- and wasn't one of the prime goals of the man he was credited with being the brains of....

I'm not prepared to say that Rove is the key guy in the GOP, but he certainly is out there whitewashing the disastrous errors of the Bush years -- at a time when the public memory of those Bush errors, up to and very much including the mismanagement of the economy, is at risk of fading.

No one on the Democratic/liberal side is making a concerted effort to ensure that we never forget who got us into this economic mess. And here, as Huffington says, is Rove setting us up for precisely that amnesia, which is at risk of increasing as our economic troubles stretch on:

Karl Rove is too smart to say he wants Obama to fail. But if Obama's recovery plan doesn't work -- and, if it doesn't, it'll be because it wasn't big and bold enough -- Rove and the gang have a highly polished narrative at the ready, one that succeeds at disconnecting what Obama had to do to stimulate to economy with what happened before he took office. Big government failed, according to this narrative. Let's bring back tax cuts and deregulation.

... That's what makes Rove so dangerous -- his unbending commitment to derailing our understanding of how we've gotten to where we are.

There needs to be a counter-Bush Legacy Project -- an effort to keep awareness of Bush's incompetence fresh in people's minds. Otherwise, there's a serious risk that this is soon going to seem to a lot of people like Obama's recession and Obama's fault -- not next week or next month, maybe, but, say six or nine months from now.

I don't agree that we should stop mocking Limbaugh -- far from it. But the public shouldn't be allowed to forget that they hated Bush, for good reason. We mustn't let that memory fade -- and we mustn't let people like Rove rewrite it.

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UPDATE, TUESDAY: And what do you know, here's the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal with a piece headlined

The Obama Economy
As the Dow keeps dropping, the President is running out of people to blame.

Yup -- he's just making excuses, because it's already his fault that a financial system that went totally broke on his predecessor's watch isn't magically healed.

Oh, but what am I saying? This isn't a profoundly damaged economy -- we're merely in "an unusual recession," according to the Journal.

Of course, I'm just saying all this because I'm in denial, as are D.C. Dems:

The Democrats who now run Washington don't want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush.

Yeah, right. You know how, when a guy gets shot in an alley mugging, and lapses into a coma, and takes weeks if not months to die, his family still wants to blame the shooter for his death, even though the gunshots happened a long time before the death? Democrats are in that kind of denial.