GOP lawmakers attempting to dent President Joe Biden's re-election prospects have been increasing their attacks on him by blaming him for an assortment of ills that will inflame their followers, MSNBC political analyst Steve Benen pointed out Monday.
The only problem, he said, is that the sins they claim Biden has been committing were actually policies that occurred on Donald Trump's watch.
In his column for MSNBC, he noted that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) attacked Biden as she worried about the loss of jobs as the debt crisis worsens, by writing, "You did all of that during your Communist COVID shutdowns. Don’t do it again to the American people Joe.”
However, as Benen pointed out, the lockdowns happened during the Trump administration.
"For now, let’s put aside Greene’s curious confusion about what 'communist' means and instead focus on the more important problem with her argument: There were Covid lockdowns in 2020, but, at the time, Biden was a private citizen with no official powers or authority," he wrote.
"When the right-wing congresswoman complains about the effects of Covid 'shutdowns,' and attributes the policies to Biden, she’s apparently forgetting who was actually in office at the time — which is odd, given that 2020 really wasn’t that long ago."
The Georgia Republican is not alone in intentionally or not getting their facts wrong.
"Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado blamed the Democratic president for Covid-related school closures in 2020 — which, again, was a year that Biden spent on the campaign trail, not in the Oval Office," he elaborated. "It also wasn’t too long ago when former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany also pointed to crime data from 2020 to blame Biden for the U.S. murder rate, apparently unaware that it was her former boss who was president at the time."
The conservative penchant for reassigning blame is not new he added, recalling, "a poll found that nearly a third of Louisiana Republicans blamed Obama for the dreadful federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Of course, in reality, Katrina made landfall in August 2005, and Obama was inaugurated in January 2009," to which he suggested, "Now, it seems much of the GOP has become calendar-challenged once again."
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