Andrew Sullivan is fed up!

Courtesy of the Daily Dish:

Obama did not have a serious choice; he had a fate. That fate was to pick up the pieces of the most catastrophic presidency in modern times. The final bouquet - after emptying the public coffers with no serious boost to employment, profits or growth - was the financial collapse, which both shrunk the economy, decimated revenues to 50 year lows, and automatically increased spending for the unemployed and poor in desperate need of help. Once you account for that - and the Nutting graph indeed shows that this was baked in the cake by the time Obama was elected - Obama has been, like most modern Democrats, far more fiscally conservative than any modern Republican. 

Now you could argue that Obama should have let the auto industry go fully bankrupt, allow the economy to head into deflation and depression without any fiscal stimulus to counter, cut the unemployed off at the knees - and we would be Greece today, underwater in a deepening and self-reinforcing depression. Can you imagine what Romney would have said about Obama's record then? 

And yes, as Suderman notes, the real criticism should be focused on the absence of any long-term deal on entitlements, defense, taxes and spending - a deal that would do a huge amount for business confidence. But seriously: if one side simply refuses to put any serious revenue increases on the table at all, who's really preventing that effort? 

There are legitimate issues to debate with respect to the future in this election. But the caricature of the last three years, the knowing lies that interweave with this false narrative, the attempt to describe a pragmatic, sane and successful president as somehow unqualified to tackle this mess - when the US economy has fared better in this period than much of the West - are deceptions, exploiting pain. I'm sick of them, and the cynicism they represent. 

 I could NOT have said it better!