We all know now, after months of this, that oil which does not remain where nature placed it, or does not get "harvested" in a way where we can use it, spews. Apparently, after more than 80 days of continuous spewing, it has been contained and, at least for now, we have been spared further spewing of oil.

So, where else can we find spewing? Spewing, is unquestionably a bad thing and, if you listen to those In the Know, it is almost always the fault of the President of the United States.

Yet the spewing that seems to be doing the most damage---at least beyond the massive oil already spewed---comes principally from two places which do not appear to link to President Obama: those who report what they call the news, and those of define what will be reported---the ever shrinking, and ever crazier group of crackpots called the Republican Party.

Of course, as discussed here repeatedly, an electorate which revels in stupidity, and, now in a crisis, lays off teachers so as to protect its franchise of stupidity the truly ridiculous absurdities which gave us the supposed guy next door President Bush over the qualified but perhaps slightly dull Vice President Gore or Senator Kerry seems to work. The Republican Party is bound to pick up seats in Congress and the President---our first actual Democrat to hold the office since 1969 and the most competent we have since then---is treated as just some lame loser biding his time until Mama Grizzly or some other equally absurd candidate is put forward as just the kind of person we need in the White House.

We are paying for this foolishness, as we will for many, many years to come. The view among so many, that you can put the government in the hands of "at least you know where he stands" or "government is not the answer; government is the problem" and then, when the government falls into complete disrepair that it cannot come to aid of hurricane victims (and cannot even find a television to see what has happened) or allows its supporters to almost drag the economy into the same ditch they drove it into in the 1930s, elect a president and expect the mess to be cleaned up in a year and a half.

And so out of what Rachel Maddow calls my tv machine spews such idiocy as that the economy is President Obama's responsibility now. We cannot keep looking backwards or blaming the president who left office so long ago.

That time in the age of twitter has sped up does not mean a) any president is "responsible for the economy" or, way more importantly that government policies which impact on the economy can repair the damage done by huge, corrupt policies, in a year and a half.

The last Great Mess they made, the one caused when

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor--these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age--other people's money--these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities

was not overcome until a world war, and the full employment it brought with it, engulfed us all. Yet the seeds planted before that war, what we call the New Deal, changed this country, and the relationship of its government to the people, forever. By the time the war was ended, there was no longer the talk of every person on his own, the survival of the fittest, and all of that. The question in the first presidential election after the war was not whether to return to those great days before President Roosevelt rode to the rescue; it was which party and which president could best meet the new responsibilities of government after the war.

Here, indeed, is Time magazine, ever rooting for Republicans, a few weeks before the 1948 election:

Tom Dewey also added was reassurance that a new team would tackle the job with new vigor, with new boundless confidence that the U.S. future had scarcely been tapped.

For that future, he promised a program not unlike Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. It included more irrigation and flood control projects, expanded rural electrification and soil conservation, protection and development of forests, oil reserves, mineral resources. To build the West's power supply he promised new river projects on the Columbia and Missouri.

Today, though, we have the two noise machines. One votes against every single proposal to improve the situation and then tells us that what the President manages to get through a Congress hobbled by the need to defeat a filibuster on everything except the declaration of Arbor Day has been a failure.

If the President proposes a stimulus, way too small for its Rooseveltian task but all that can be enacted, he is to blamed for the fact that it did not alone get us out of the chasm (no ditch this) into which we have fallen by years of deregulation and coddling of the monied folk because it is their money that fuels the only thing that is important---political campaigns.

If the chairwoman of the council of economic advisers warns that without a huge stimulus unemployment will soar over 8%, and after a smaller stimulus unemployment exceeds 8%, the President is called a snake oil salesman because his "promise" that any stimulus at all would keep unemployment under 8%. This is not John Beohner or Mitch McConnell speaking, or Sarah Palin, for crying out loud, it is
George Will.

This is the nature of our political debate. A ridiculous claim, repeated over and over and the staple of the Sunday morning programs aimed at "balance."

Check out, for instance, last week's Meet the Press interview of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, with David Gregory and his GOP minded cronies at Politico trying to use that same Republican sledge hammer:

And we know that there's a sense that even the stimulus is not producing the jobs that it was promised to; 9.5 percent unemployment now. The original reporting was we'd keep unemployment with the stimulus at 8 percent.

And here's Politico just this morning, Jonathan Martin writing about some of the feeling among Democrats, let me put it up on the screen. "While almost uniformly grateful for the financial windfall they enjoyed from the stimulus legislation, the Democrats," some Democrats, "believe it wasn't sold well to the public and more still has to be done to revive the lagging economy. `I think the bottom line is they're not seeing the jobs that should have come with it,' said West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin," now running for Senate, "explaining why voters in his state were dissatisfied with the massive spending bill. `Are we just protecting government or are we really stimulating the economy?'"

Really, David? Is that what they said as the administration took office. Do what we say an unemployment will stay under 8%? Put aside the fact that the report to which you constantly refer, explicitly said:

all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error...There is the more fundamental uncertainty that comes with any estimate of the effects of a program. Our estimates of economic relationships and rules of thumb are derived from historical experience and so will not apply exactly in any given episode. Furthermore, the uncertainty is surely higher than normal now because the current recession is unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity

Instead, David, watch those lovely recordings of you beating up on David Axelrod when they had not resolved the mess left for them in their first three weeks and to his explanation of what might happen next:

MR. GREGORY: ...here's the bottom line question: What will this stimulus plan do to ease the recession this year?

MR. AXELROD: Well, I think that there's going to be some immediate activity. You know, let's, let's understand, this is the worst economic downturn we've had since World War II. So our first mission is to try and slow the trajectory of it and turn it around. This will do that. This will help do that. We believe in the next couple of years that it will create three and a half million jobs. That's going to be very important. We're also going to prevent the layoff of key personnel in states, like teachers, police, firefighters. We're going to help those who are caught in the, in the brunt of this with longer unemployment insurance, helping them with their health care. And ultimately we're going to put people to work doing the work that America needs done in energy, in health care, in education, rebuilding our roads, bridges, dams and levees. That's going to have a long-term effect and a short-term effect. But a lot of those projects are going to begin soon. But...

MR. GREGORY: But--yeah.

MR. AXELROD: ...let's be clear, though, it's not going to be an overnight turnaround. The president's been clear; it took a long time for us to get in this mess, it's going to take a while for us to get out of it.

MR. GREGORY: Unemployment is at 7.6 percent. That doesn't even capture people who have stopped looking for work.

MR. AXELROD: Yes.

MR. GREGORY: Will this stimulus plan prevent unemployment from reaching 10 percent, do you think?

MR. AXELROD: Well, that's our hope. That's our hope. There's no doubt that without it that's what--that's where we were looking, double-digit unemployment. And that's what we're trying to forestall. We want to turn this thing around, and we think that this will, will happen. That's why the president had such a sense of urgency of acting now. As you know, we lost 600,000 jobs last month, over one and a half million in the last three months. The trajectory is horrible. This should help put the brakes on that and slow it down.

This is not political debate or journalism. It is mud wrestling for entertainment value. It is why Sarah Palin's daughter takes up airtime not otherwise being used to blame President Obama for electing Ronald Reagan, two George Bushes and Congresses that gave the country back to the very people FDR defeated so long ago.

And tomorrow, when our big electronic noise machine revs up again, we can debate whether the President should be in Maine this weekend.