Last night while consuming some adult beverages before bed, I apparently didn't have a big enough headache, so I watched the beginning of the Obama campaign's propaganda documentary [9] they just released.
Clearly I was prepared to hear some "it's all Bush's fault" lines, etc, but what caught my ear came about two minutes in, when for some reason they let Austan Goolsbee, ex-chairman of the council of economic advisers speak.
With commentary that would make Edward Bernays proud, Goolsbee praised the President's bold actions (increasing the nation's debt, and bailing out unions & banks).
While his nose started to grow right there on camera, Goolsbee then said "the six months surrounding january 2009, is the worst six months ever. That we ever had in the data"
I sat there and looked at my desk, only one empty beer bottle on it. Nope, I wasn't drunk. So, I pinged Goolsbee on twitter to ask him if I really just heard what I thought I heard -- yup, I did.
All I can assume here is that either progressives really are trying to rewrite history (which is a possibility), or as the President's chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee did not have had access to www.stlouisfed.org [10]. I say this because if he did have to access that site, he would find that in terms of real GDP, there were a few periods throughout history that were worse than the period in the financial crisis he referenced.
I'm not sure where 64 years comes from, but even if he was not smart enough to look at history back to the Great Depression, there was a period within that 64 year window that was worse than 2008-2009.
This is the same nonsense we heard back in 2008 as TARP [11] was proposed, and in early 2009 as the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act [12] was being shoved down our throats.
Moral of the story here is that you must do your own homework. Nobody will be honest with you about what's really going on (ok, with ZH as the notable exception of course).
Goolsbee did end up getting fired stepping down due to his incompetence - now he just teaches our youth and appears on CNBC.