Slick Insights: The Country's a Mess Because of the Tea Party or Something

Strange, but the left keeps telling how irrelevant the Tea Party is while at the same time demonizing them daily and fundraising off them. The Occupy Wall Street mob, by contrast, is described as peaceful at every turn despite all evidence to the contrary. So now along comes a guy who did plenty of occupying in his time (despite protestations of the women, on occasion) to tell us the country's woeful condition can be blamed on tea party sentiments dating back to the, um, 1980s.

In his book, “Back to Work,” Clinton analyzes the factors that contributed to the nation’s current economic woes and offers several policy prescriptions he says would create jobs and make the U.S. more competitive. While he generally praises Obama for taking steps to mitigate the financial crisis and deep recession, he also gently dings the president for poor communication and strategic misfires.

The book is scheduled for release next Tuesday by publisher Knopf. The Associated Press bought a copy on Thursday.

Clinton, a Democrat, describes the current state of the country as “a mess” and largely blames the anti-government sentiment embodied in the tea party movement that has held sway since the 1980s. But Clinton also criticizes Obama and other Democratic lawmakers for not making a stronger case for the steps they took to stabilize the U.S. economy in 2009, like the bank and auto company bailouts and the $787 billion economic stimulus program.

Maybe I missed a couple of decades, but I recall the Tea Party movement began in 2009, after the failed stimulus.

There's plenty of other revisionist history.

Clinton recalls his own eight years in the White House in glowing terms, noting how his economic policies helped create 22 million jobs and substantially reduce the federal debt. Among other things, he says, he was able to persuade many wealthy people to accept higher taxes because “I didn’t attack them for their success.”

Amazing how he overcame those angry tea party sentiments during those eight years. Of course jobs were created in spite of him. He'll fail to point out there's was virtually zero growth during the first two years of his presidency, a colossal failure that resulted in Democrats losing both the House and Senate in the 1994 elections. If there was no Republican majorities the rest of his term his rosy recollections would never have come to fruition.

Don;t expect any interviewers to point this stuff out during his book tour.