Malkin has quite a doozy up at memeorandum right now:
On Nov. 4, after Barack Obama clinched the White House, the market closed at 9,625.28.
In mid-morning trading today, the day President Obama signs his massive Generational Theft Act into law and a day before he unveils a massive new mortgage entitlement, the Dow dropped to to 7,606.53.
Now, imagine if President Bush had presided over a 2,000-point stock market tumble in the same time period — during the first few months of his presidency.
Great start, O.
A couple things make things make this post wingnuttier than normal. Put aside the fact that George Bush presided over a market crash from 14,000 to 8000, this is the the same Michelle Malkin who spent the last few months ranting about the Office of the President Elect:
Okay, it’s one thing to take your campaign website, transfer it to a dot-gov domain, and invent an “Office of the President-Elect” out of whole cloth.
But now we’ve got Sen. Obama standing in front of a podium, in front of the world, for his first transitional press conference with an official-looking sign that reads “Office of the President-Elect.” Is that the official seal of the U.S. on the sign? Do they have authority to use it? What other make-believe offices are they going to invent between now and Inauguration Day? I can’t ever recall in my lifetime any mention of such an office. Can you?
Now, apparently, Malkin suddenly believes that the Office of President Elect holds real power, much more so than the actual Presidency, because she wants to credit the market decline from November 4th until now to… Barack Obama.
The simple fact of the matter is that when George Bush took office in 2001, the market was at around 10,500. During his administration, it rose to around 14k at the peak. When he left office, it was at around 8000. I am not making this up, so if you do not trust me, you can check the data for yourself. Slide the graph around and do your own thing. Check any date you want.
In fact, the market has only fallen a couple hundred points from when Obama took office, Malkin knows it, and now she is just flat out making things up and hoping you are stupid enough to not notice. Everyone knew they would attempt to blame the Bush administration’s failings on the Democrats and the Obama administration, and the facts really are stacked against them so they have a tough job, but quite honestly, I thought they would be a little bit better at it than this. The crazy people ranting about black helicopters have more credibility, and at least try to make a coherent argument. The nut of her argument is “If you pretend Obama was President two months and a few weeks before he took office, he is to blame for the market declines during that time period.” Really, it is that stupid.
This is just silly, and they are really just phoning it in.
*** Update ***
It occurred to me that this is quite possibly stupid enough that it can be the centerpiece of the discussion of Meet the Press with David Gregory this weekend.
And while we are at it, as silly as it is to say that the market has dropped several thousand for Obama when he was not even President, I see a lot of harrumphing that everything is the Republican’s fault (and I am at times am guilty of this). That isn’t entirely accurate, either, as many people have noted repeatedly during Obama’s selection of his economic and financial team. There is, to an extent, a broadly bi-partisan base to blame this whole ponzi scheme on. Rubin and Clinton played a role in the deregulation, and let’s not forget who re-appointed Greenspan. And when you read stories about this global meltdown, it makes it even more obvious that it is simplistic to simply blame this mess on one political party. The Republicans should get their fair share of it, and I think they should shoulder much of the blame simply because they were in charge the last eight years and have pushed an agenda of tax cuts and higher spending on top of a platform of widespread deregulation, but a lot of people are guilty for this mess.
More here from Steve Taylor.