by Jerome a Paris Sat Jan 10th, 2009 at 10:35:12 AM EST

One of the most fascinating pieces of history rewriting in recent years has been the transformation of Chirac into a raging lefty, now thankfully toppled by a 'real' rightwinger, Sarkozy. Sarkozy's election has been described as transformative, a clean break from Chirac's knee-jerk anti-Americanism (as if he hadn't been welcomed, when elected, as the most pro-American president ever), his unseemly hostility to the war in Iraq (as if he hadn't called that one correctly), the 35-hour week (promoted under Chirac's rule, but by a socialist government) and his caving-to-the-lefty-mob tendancies (as if the strongest person in his last several governments, and the all-powerful inspirer of his aggressive law'n'order and anti-immigrant policies had not been Nicolas Sarkozy himself).

Today, we are beginning to see the same rewriting of history with respect to president Bush - except that the goal is not to present the November election as a transformative one, but as a non-event whereby one president continues the same spendthrift policies of his quasi-Democrat predecessor. In a big opinion article today with a rather explicit title ('Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years, the Wall Street Journal seriously explains this:

these acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008. We already have been served up the $700 billion "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act" and the "Auto Industry Financing and Restructuring Act." Now that Barack Obama is in town, he will soon sign into law with great urgency the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan." This latest Hail Mary pass will increase the federal budget (which has already expanded by $1.5 trillion in eight years under George Bush) by an additional $1 trillion -- in roughly his first 100 days in office. The current economic strategy is right out of "Atlas Shrugged": The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. That's the justification for the $2 trillion of subsidies doled out already to keep afloat distressed insurance companies, banks, Wall Street investment houses, and auto companies

I don't doubt that the Democratic Congress will be blamed and presented as the all-powerful driver of these bailouts, but, as the article makes clear, Bush and Paulson are going to be dumped into the same "government is bad" bag.

The debate will not be about where the crisis came from ("crises happen", in capitalism, it's a necessary, cleansing process, and do you really want communism back?), it will skim over the fact that the hard right completely controlled all branches of government over the first half the decade, could and did implement its tax-reduction, regulation-dismantling, big business-favoring policies. It will ignore the fact that Randian bot Alan 'Bubbles' Greenspan ran monetary policy thoughout and justifies to this day his choice of insanely lax cheap money which is at the heart of the current meltdown. It will gloss over the fact that the Paulson plan was initiated by ... Paulson, a Bush White House appointee, and rammed through Congress under threat of apocalyptic crisis.

Basically, voluntarily-badly run government leading (unsurprisingly) to catastrophe is used as an argument that "government" is evil, rather than the "voluntary badly-run" bit.

Thus, that Republicans (or Chirac) cannot or will not run government properly is turned into "all governments are bad" and, given that, of course, Republicans are the party of small government and Democrats of reckless tax-and-spend, the blame firmly rests with the latter - see, they are already running a trillion dollar deficit!

Will the public buy that sleight-of-hand? Hopefully not. But let's all be ready for that story to be relentlessly pushed by the right, which will suddenly rediscover virtue now that it is no longer in power and blame the cleanup crew for the mess they made. The gall should no longer surprise us, but it's still indispensable to point it out for what it is as loudly as we can.