President Harry S. Truman was proud of his sign displayed prominently on the Oval Office desk – “The Buck Stops Here”.   No other principle was as important to him.  He understood that the occupant of the office of the President held ultimate authority and ultimate responsibility for the events and actions that occurred during his watch.  The weight of the responsibility was clear to him from the very first moment he took the oath:

“I felt as if the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me. I got the most terribly responsible job a man ever had.”

        There was additional little doubt in Truman’s mind the process of politics created the critical energy and vetting needed to achieve real change, but it never occurred to him that anybody else could inevitably to be seen as the fulcrum of all credit and blame under a President’s watch.  He had no time for whiners.

     Our current President has made an art of being the anti-Truman. Wherever the responsibility for our current mess resides, he wants everyone to know it doesn’t reside with him.  For the umpteenth time in a recent interview, he looks at the economic chaos and stagnation before him, and nearly three years into his watch sees where the buck of responsibility clearly rests – George W. Bush. A clever device of the Democrat party in undercutting the previous President, candidate Obama brought the device to a fever pitchand, like a one trick pony, can not seem to divest himself of the role the SuperBush has played in preventing Obama from achieving sustained recovery. The mantra of Democrats in regards to the supernatural capacities of our supposedly mentally enfeebled former president to continue to reek economic havoc, nearly three years after he released control, is a wonder to behold. President George W. Bush, singularly responsible for .Com recession, 9/11, the lack of WMD, Abu Griab, the Iraqi debacle, global warming, Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the housing bubble and Mortgagegeddon, World hatred of the United States, and the Banking collapse, apparently continues to wage nefarious control over our current President’s success.

     Obviously the blame game can only go so far. The farther one gets from BushHitler the harder it gets to connect the dots that link the barbarian to our current mess. In fact, the current stagnation in recovery and apparent drift toward a second recession is progressively being recognized as a pillar of President Obama’s time at the tiller, and the President may be the last to recognize it. Unlike Truman, who was politically able to rail against the “do nothing” republican Congress of 1947-48, President Obama’s Democrat party has been in control since 2007 and the opposition has had to mostly sit back and accept the massive increases in government size and regulation, stimulus spending, and the progressively creepy and destructive Obamacare.

     The crux of the matter for Obama is, the American public can tolerate a blowhard, barely tolerate a fabricator, but can not tolerate a whiner. Kind of unbecoming. Maybe somebody ought to get the President a copy of Truman’s sign.