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In a nationally televised address to the American people on March 4, 1987, President Ronald Reagan admitted he had traded arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal and declared, "This happened on my watch." Sadly, that may have been the last time a Republican leader took ownership of a disaster by simply acknowledging the calendar. After all, according to the Republicans' ever-malleable timelines, the Clinton economic boom came thanks to Ronald Reagan, President Bush inherited a recession and 9/11 from his Democratic predecessor, and the financial collapse in 2008 was the "Obama Bear Market." And now, the GOP's new math dictates, George W. Bush deserves the credit for killing Osama Bin Laden.

No doubt, the elimination of the Al Qaeda chieftain was the culmination of years of intelligence work and military asset building that spanned the Bush and Obama administrations. But while President Bush diverted resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, shuttered the CIA's Bin Laden unit and cancelled a 2005 U.S. special operations raid into Pakistan, it was Barack Obama who as promised tripled U.S. troop strength and repeatedly declared that "that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights."

That's a far cry from President Bush declaration on March 13, 2002 - just six months after the carnage of 9/11 - that in the wake of the failure to capture Bin Laden in Tora Bora, "I truly am not that concerned about him."

Nevertheless, according to the latest Republican revisionist history, George W. Bush did everything but pull the trigger on Sunday. (More ironic still, Bush’s supporters accused President Obama of taking a “victory lap” after the death of Bin Laden, which occurred exactly 8 years to the day after Dubya appeared in a flight suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.)

Despite virtually no evidence to support the claim, GOP torture enthusiasts like Peter King (R-NY) trumpeted that "We obtained that information through waterboarding." House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was just one of a legion of conservatives explaining that credit had one degree of separation, announcing "I commend President Obama who has followed the vigilance of President Bush in bringing bin Laden to justice." While Sarah Palin refused to even utter Obama’s name in crediting President Bush, right-wing billionaire sugar daddy David Koch complained that Obama “just made the decision, it was obvious where the guy is.” Donald Rumsfeld similarly praised his former boss:

"All of this was made possible by the relentless, sustained pressure on al Qaeda that the Bush administration initiated after 9/11 and that the Obama administration has wisely chosen to continue."

But if Republican mythology states that George W. Bush is responsible for apprehending the mastermind of 9/11, the attacks ten years ago were all Bill Clinton's fault.

That's an interesting charge, given President Bush's response to the CIA presenter of the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief:

"All right. You've covered your ass, now."

That would be the same PDB about which Condoleezza Rice explained to the 9/11 Commission, "I believe the title was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." And while National Security Advisor Rice protested in 2002 that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would...try to use an airplane as a missile," counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had anticipated exactly that. As it turned out, the plan he presented to Rice in January 2001 only became the subject of a national security "principals meeting" in the days just before September 11. (Bush, you'll recall, spent the previous month at his Crawford, Texas ranch agonizing about his policy on stem cell research which his adviser Karen Hughes described at the time as "the most important decision of your presidency.") It's no wonder Sandy Berger told Rice during the transition that "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject."

Nevertheless, conservative theology required that the 9/11 attacks which occurred eight months into the Bush presidency were entirely Bill Clinton's fault. Then die-hard conservative Andrew Sullivan summed up the tried but untrue talking point, claiming "[Clinton] was more responsible than anyone for the gaping holes in national security and intelligence that made Sept. 11 possible. The buck must stop with him." A national security disaster that spanned both administrations, in the telling of Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft to the 9/11 Commission in April 2004, belonged solely to one man:

"But the simple fact of September 11 is this: we did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies. Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions, and starved for basic information technology. The old national intelligence system in place on September 11 was destined to fail."

According to Republican calculus, Bill Clinton was also responsible for every calamity which befell the economy under George W. Bush. Given that Clinton presided over the creation of 23 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in decades, robust economic growth and a balanced budget, that might seem like a dubious claim.

Dubious, that it, until conservatives clarify that the Clinton boom of the late 1990's was the result of the invisible hand of Ronald Reagan.

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Market analysts - at least of the cable TV variety - seem to tiptoe around the obvious: if you don't cull the herd of insolvent banks and let the market bottom out, you won't be able to start the climb back up.

NEW YORK, Feb. 20 -- With the Dow Jones industrial average plunging past its lowest point since the financial crisis began, panicked investors are asking: How much uglier can it get?

Many market analysts and technicians armed with reams of historical data say that even though the Dow has given back all its gains -- and more -- from the five-year bull market that ended in 2007, it is unlikely the market has hit bottom.

Mark Arbeter, chief technical strategist at Standard & Poor's Equity Research, said the current market environment is showing few of the signs that have characterized previous lows -- high price volatility, high volumes of trading and even higher levels of fear.

"Bear market bottoms tend to be violent affairs," he said. "You sell hard, you rally hard, you go down hard and then you're off to the races. And that's not what were seeing right now. Until this week, the market was really drifting sideways."

And for all the jitteriness out there, Arbeter added, the options market, where investors trade contracts that bet on the future direction of the stock market, is not showing the fear that signals that true capitulation has arrived. Many market participants think capitulation -- when investors take their losses and get out of the market altogether -- must precede a major market recovery.

"We have not reached high enough levels of fear in the options market to suggest that this test of the lows is going to be successful," Arbeter said.