Just the facts, ma'am.

A few days ago, I wrote about Senator Kyl's attempt to claim that the Republicans were responsible for good economic news...retroactively. As I said then, this is going to be a theme in the upcoming months. It will be an attempt by the Republicans to re-write the history we all just lived. As Steve Benen wrote yesterday, they'll be counting on us all having amnesia about what happened the last few years.

Jay Bookman describes the Republican attempt to actually blame the recession on Democrats:

By cutting its own budget by 5 percent, Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that “the House has sent a strong signal of its commitment to making the tough choices necessary to end Washington’s job-killing spending binge.”

In comments today on raising the debt limit, Boehner called for action to “cut spending and end the job-killing spending binge in Washington.”

In announcing the tax-cut agreement last month with President Obama, Boehner said that “if we actually want to help our economy get back on track and to begin creating jobs, we need to end the job-killing spending binge.”

Such repetition is not accidental. To the contrary, it represents a calculated, organized effort by Boehner and other conservatives to try to rewrite recent history and make the American people “misremember” what actually happened to them and their country in the last few years. It is an effort to drive home the point — the absolutely false point — that the greatest economic collapse in 80 years was somehow caused by government spending.

It is an absolutely false narrative. And perhaps a few graphs can speak better to that than words.

Here's the monthly jobs gain/lost report put out by the Dept. of Labor (red is Bush's last year and blue is Obama's first two years).



In other words, jobs lost before and after the stimulus.



And how the stock market crashed and recovered.



To put it simply, Bush and Republicans got us into this mess. Obama and the Democrats have helped us start to climb out of all of that.

Just the facts, ma'am.