For my sins, I followed a link from Matthew Yglesias to Erick Erickson’s explanation of how great the Bush tax cuts really were. And there I learned some things I didn’t know:

More crucially, after the 2001 initial tax cuts, the annual growth rate went from 0.3% in 2001 to 2.5% in 2002. By 2004, GDP growth was the highest in 20 years.

Um:

And:

Likewise, after the 2003 tax cuts, the unemployment rate fell to the lowest level since World War II. Let me repeat that: the Bush economic program created the lowest unemployment level ever.

More um:

The bit about unemployment really surprised me — after all, the incredibly good job market of the late 90s isn’t that far behind us.

But I think we have part of the key to how Republicans can believe that returning to the Bush agenda is exactly what we need: they’ve invented themselves an alternate history in which wonderful things happened under Bush, and earlier booms have been sent down the memory hole.