Did You Know...

Comedy gold to kick off a new week of market turmoil and Treasury Department incompetence: Barack Obama phoned up the New York Times to clarify, uh, that he’s not really a socialist because an unnamed former administration (here, Barry, let me help you: Bush the pre-socializer) poured billions of tax dollars into failing business, so, uh, he didn’t start it. He’s not a socialist. He just plays one on TV.

Behold the role model of personal responsibility:

President Obama was so concerned that he had appeared to dismiss a question from New York Times reporters about whether he was a socialist that he called the newspaper from the Oval Office to clarify his policies.

“It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question,” he told reporters, who had interviewed the president aboard Air Force One on Friday.

Opening the unusual presidential call to reporters by saying that there was “just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter,” he said it wasn’t he who started the federal government’s intervention into the nation’s financial system.

“I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement -– the prescription drug plan — without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word ‘socialist’ around can’t say the same.”

Translation: We didn’t start the fire, therefore dumping more gasoline on it is not socialism.

Obamanomics: Chains you can believe in.