It started really early: just a week or so after Obama won the election, right-wingers were already calling our current economic crisis the “Obama Recession.” Remember, these are the same people who were still blaming Clinton for the recession for years into Bush’s term. They couldn’t even wait for Obama to actually step into office, they had to start blaming him for the economic woes a full two months before he could even start doing anything about it.

Apparently, right-wingers are applying the Pottery Barn rule, only in reverse: “you bought it, you broke it” seems to be their new motto. Hell, there are right-wing bloggers out there saying that we should measure the “Obama economy” based on the economy’s performance from the time of his nomination in June last year. Give them time, and they’ll find a way to pin the blame for the Great Depression on him.

Now that they have established that every economic downturn since people even heard about Obama is all his fault, the question now becomes, how much can we bash Obama if the economy fails to boom within x number of months or years? Remember, for Bush this was not supposed to be an issue. Remember back in 2004 when Bush was claiming that a recovery was “just around the corner”? That was almost four years after Bush took office, and Bush’s commerce secretary was still saying stuff like, “The president inherited a Clinton recession and turned it into the early stages of Bush prosperity.” That was for a recession that started two months after Bush took office (though they tried real hard to apply revisionist history on that), as opposed to this recession, which started in December 2007–a full thirteen months before Obama took office.

And yet, just a month into his presidency, and the pundits are coming down on Obama every time bad news comes out. Somehow, bad economic news in a recession that began after he left office was Clinton’s fault for years after he was gone, and yet somehow Obama is responsible for a recession in its 14th month despite just barely having unpacked his suitcases.

Of course, I should not be surprised. Goodness knows I have never faulted conservatives for their relentless sense of consistency.