Seven years ago, in the midst of the Great Recession, when Jonathan Chait worried that the economy would recover and Obama would actually get credit for it, he fretted that Republicans didn’t seem to have a contingency plan for that event.

My response was that they did have a contingency plan: lie.

That’s how they claimed Clinton was not responsible for the booming economy he oversaw. If the economy gets better, claim it was because of actions taken by Republicans in the Bush years which came to fruition later, because of economic conditions completely divorced from Obama, and because of pressures Republicans exerted to shape policies during the Obama administration. Meanwhile, they will blame Obama for every piece of negative news during that time (there is always something bad happening), and will claim he’s the most liberal and worst president ever.

Is Chait new here or something?

Wow, was I right. Just last week Brit Hume was claiming that Bush deserved credit for the recovery, and he’s far from the first. And in that same piece, he blamed Obama for everything that went wrong. Again, not the first time.

Not that I was unusually prescient or anything. It was totally predictable and easy to see coming.