You are going to hear this alot....

....Over the next few months you are going to hear a lot of very important people say, "
No one could have predicted this!".

Now I loathed this when Republicans did it with the Iraq War (as Glenn Greenwald ably documents) and I hate it even more when Democrats do it with regards to the Great Recession.

Asked if the stimulus bill was too small, [White House press secretary Robert] Gibbs says: "I think it makes sense to step back just for a second. ... Nobody had, in January of 2009, a sufficient grasp of ... what we were facing." He adds that any stimulus was "unlikely to fill" the hole the financial meltdown created.

"What the Recovery Act did was prevent us from sliding even into a deeper recession with greater economic contraction, with greater job loss than we have experienced because of it," he says.

But in this case, one of the main critics who called them on this is not afraid to speak up. Not because he is always correct but because this what always happens when errors in judgment are made. First, it is "unprecedented", then "No one could have known", always an attempt to deflect and pass blame. Well "nobody" was "concerned" at the time.

The truth is that some of us were practically screaming back in January 2009 that the administration was proposing too small a program. Start with this post and work forward. And no, the point isn’t that I’m so smart — it is that given the forecasts we had at the time, and given historical experience of recessions after financial crises, it wasn’t at all hard to see that the plan was too small. Things have been worse than expected — but not that much worse.

And why does this matter? Because the best chance Obama et al have to change things now is to make the case that we need to do more, and that Republicans stand in the way. Yet here they are, apparently trying to run on the claim that they had it right all along, or something. Is this just boneheaded political strategy? Is it about the egos of the advisers who called it wrong? I don’t know — but it fills me with despair.

Me too Dr. Krugman.

And the Democratic leadership is surprised at the lack of enthusiasm in their base. Maybe if you didn't lie about even this. You would have shown a small glimmer of the leadership we had hoped for.

-Cheers