Here’s another shining example of a Republican reflexively refusing to accept responsibility for his own and his party’s misdeeds and incompetence:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says don’t blame George Bush for leaving President Obama with an economic catastrophe.

It was everyone else, and the Democrats, who brought on disaster, said Cheney, who was one of Bush’s most influential advisers over his eight years leading the country.

“There’s no question that what the economic circumstances that \[Obama\] inherited are difficult ones,” Cheney said on CNN [Sunday] morning. “I don’t think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances.”

Instead, Cheney suggested the current problems stem for the worsening world economy and Democratic obstruction of Bush’s attempts at reforming the government-backed mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie.

“This isn’t something that happened just in the Bush administration or just in the United States,” Cheney said. “We are in the midst of a worldwide economic period of considerable difficulty here.

“It’s important to understand that. It doesn’t do just to go back and say, well, ‘George Bush was president and that is why everything is screwed up,’ because that is simply not true,” Cheney said.

Got that? Bush and Cheney are the victims here. Riiiight.

The mortgage crisis may have lit the fuse — and Cheney conveniently omits the fact that until recently Bush used to claim the expansion of home ownership as one of his administration’s very few successes — but what caused the implosion was deregulatoin of financial institutions by GOP bank toadies like former Sen. Phil Gramm.

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