Anyone who is following market trends and the economy knows the recovery is moving along nicely, and it seems the major indexes are poised to post record highs.
So, I ask you, does anyone remember way back to the presidential campaign when Republicans kept noting the "failed economic policies of the Obama administration?" The economy has improved from its lowest point and is continuing to improve. It really wasn't so hard to see those "failed" policies were, albeit slowly, working.
Yet when we are continually distracted by the present and lurching from one crisis to another, we tend to forget the past. Had Mitt Romney been elected, he would no doubt have told us the economic upswing was all due to his being elected. Then, his policies, similar to the truly failed policies of President George W. Bush, would probably have proceeded to reverse it. If it were not for the extremist Republicans who continue to hamstring the administration's economic programs, the economy would be improving even more quickly and steadily.
All it takes to see through what Vice President Joe Biden so colorfully described as "malarkey" is the time to get the facts and to reflect on them without refracting them through the lenses of ingrained dogma, ideology and prejudice. Add to that memories of the recent past and the ability to differentiate between cause and effect.
Let's remember this one example of how facts, logic and the nation's welfare were, nearly, and could yet be, the victims of what should have been the most transparent of flimflammery.
NORMAN DOVBERG
Albany