The GOP did not even want Bush at Norm's GOP convention, telling him to take a hike. Those with a memory and non-miniscule attention span will recall that.
Regarding the latest bad news; this link. Strib carries the AP feed, which bases the report on Census info.
Now we know. Michele Bachmann raged about the census because she did not want people to report census information. Her GOP people poisoned the economy and the less known about how badly it had been poisoned, what ensued, the better for her GOP people.
It's no privacy thing. It's burying the hardship skeletons so they don't rattle too much against the GOP going into the general election.
Why Obama kept Bernanke, after he was Bush's anointed "bailout Wall Street and throw everyone else under the bus" Fed Chairman, is something I still cannot understand.
And if the GOP had been less the Party of NO, in impeding all reasonable effort to ameliorate the situation, we might not be in as deep a hole. But they locked their entire focus upon the politics of not letting Obama improve things so they could recast blame and get into a finger-pointing Tea Party frenzy. The GOP put naked politics ahead of serving the nation and ahead of meeting fiscal priorities and needs that would have lessened hardship. They were awful. They caused the fall, clearly on their watch, and then deliberately did all they could to make things worse for citizens after that. They were awful and remain awful.