Rewriting History

The following is part of an email I received from a right wing friend.

“What gets me worse is how Bill [Clinton] dismantled the requirements to buy houses (no money down and no resources) and Bush put up with it.”

My but these people are picky about their history, nearly as much as their science! They don’t think they’re rewriting it because in their view history has yet to be written. You see the whole housing bubble was started by Clinton. He felt that that more home ownership would cause voters to think more like Democrats than Republicans, just like privatizing Social Security. Poor old W just had to suffer with this for another eight years.

Among these folks are those who believe that we should have and could have won the Vietnam War, despite the fact that after we’d given up and lost it the “domino theory,” on which the whole effort was based, turned out to be something of an overstatement. I suspect that at this moment there may be elves in the Republican brain trust trying to write a story to justify invading Iraq. One of them might even be Mrs. Clarence Thomas. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last on this subject.

Our two greatest economic disasters in the past hundred years took place at the crest of long periods of Laissez Faire economy. Yet we have people, proclaimed as experts, who believe that less supervision is the answer to our current problems in an economy that already has less than at any time in thirty years. Yes that thirty years!

I don’t preclude the possibility that our guys may have dabbled with history to support a point here or there. If they did Mrs. Thomas would probably know. But if anybody is keeping score I’m certain they’re well ahead of us in this department. I close my case with Ann Coulter who believes that Senator Joseph McCarthy was a great patriot.