Quickies: Throw Him An Anvil!

     Because he’s drowning in his own self-worship:

     As President Obama’s second term nears its end he has begun a media tour emphasizing what he claims are the positive aspects of his policies. The complicit media, of course, have long worked to inflate positive impressions of Obama’s legacy, and this latest set of interviews is no different.

     “In two recent interviews, with The New York Times Magazine on his economic legacy and with The Atlantic on his foreign policy legacy, Mr. Obama expressed a common sentiment: He had achieved big things and avoided even bigger mistakes, and yet most people just shrug,” wrote Mark Landler for The New York Times on April 28.

     Landler writes that this may be because Obama describes his successes as negatives, that “without the steps he took—or didn’t take…things would have turned out so much worse.”

     Please read the whole article. It presents several examples of the Obamunists’ use of tendentious numbers to bolster the case for Obama’s policies, and by implication, his “legacy.” This has been typical of the Left for decades. Quoth Thomas Sowell:

     Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the [left-liberal] policies instituted are dismissed as “simplistic” for ignoring the “complexities” involved, as “many factors” went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the invisible damage from other factors.

     This is the case we must press – the Left’s arrogation not merely of the best policy vision, but also its “ownership” of any favorable statistics and dismissal of any unfavorable ones, while they baldly deny any accuracy of foresight in those who had predicted that their policies would lead to disaster.