The Right Wing Noise Machine Continues

So not only is the push for the situation we're in being characterized as the "Obama Recession," now we have wingnuts like Mary Matalin claiming that the Reagan 1981 recession was worse and for that matter, so was the Bush 2001 recession.

MATALIN: I don’t want to say I’m panic-free... but I do have the perspective we’ve been through worse. Reagan had a worse recession, and arguably George W. Bush, I was there in that pre-9/11. We inherited a recession. We acted quickly, and the recession, in combination with 9/11, was shallow and short, and we went on to have 52 months of consecutive growth. I’m not doing talking points here.

Nice qualifier, huh? "I'm not doing talking points here." Except for the "we inherited a recession" part and the "52 months of consecutive job growth" part.

Well, Matalin must have not seen February's 651,000 job losses which officially puts us at a deeper loss than the '81-'82 recession. And do I need to remind anyone that we weren't in a 18 month nose dive when Bush took office, nor was 9/11 to blame for the mild (in comparison) recession Bush oversaw which started in March of 2001?

(Chart from TIME Online)

That brown line, which only shows losses through December 2007, is the current recession as opposed to the Bush recession shown by the orange line. In fact, this chart also shows that every other recession was deeper and recovered faster than that of Bush's two term clusterfuck.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the Mary Matalin/James Carville household.

(H/T Think Progress)