Dana Milbank just got yanked from the Bush Christmas Card list

While I’m frequently frustrated with most of the national press for treating Bush with kid gloves, there are two high-profile journalists who don’t mind pointing to Bush’s often-outrageous lies. One is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the other is Washington Post White House reporter Dana Milbank.

(In some ways, Milbank’s efforts are even more laudable because, unlike Krugman, Milbank is a beat reporter who risks alienating White House sources every time he mentions the president’s dependence on deception.)

The article in today’s Post shows Milbank in true form. It’s one of the stories you’d love to see on the front page above the fold, instead of buried on page A11. Nevertheless, Milbank documents a classic Bush falsehood.

As Bush telling supporters in Miami yesterday, “Two-and-a-half years ago, we inherited an economy in recession.” It’s a line Bush has repeated incessantly for weeks, including in fundraising appearances in Washington, Georgia, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It’s quintessential Bush — my failed economic policies are Clinton’s fault. So much for Bush ushering in a new “era of responsibility” in America.

More importantly, it’s not true. As Milbank takes pains to document, “it’s a case of what the president has called, in another context, revisionist history.”

“The recession officially began in March of 2001 — two months after Bush was sworn in — according to the universally acknowledged arbiter of such things, the National Bureau of Economic Research,” Milbank explained.

When the report was issued, Bush acknowledged the Bureau’s finding without argument. “This week, the official announcement came that our economy has been in recession since March,” Bush said in his radio address the next weekend. “And unfortunately, to a lot of Americans, that news comes as no surprise.”

So far, so good. Last summer, however, Bush began changing the story a bit.

Milbank noted today, beginning in August 2002, Bush began to say that “we did, in fact, inherit an economic recession.” Addressing Republican governors in September, he declared: “I want you all to remember that when Dick Cheney and I got sworn in, the country was in a recession.” In May of this year, Bush even gave the recession an official starting date three weeks before he took office, saying “our nation went into a recession, starting January 1 of 2001.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Bush was saying these things to convince the public that Clinton is to blame for the anemic economic growth that has occurred under Bush’s “leadership.” But as John Adams once said, facts are stubborn things.