Sure, pal. Whatever you need to tell yourself.

VPOTUS blamed the George W. Bush administration for any unpopularity the current administration has suffered.

“We inherited a cynical republic, and I can’t blame them,” he said.

“Eight years of collapse, eight years of being misled about wars.”

He cast the Republican political strategy since last January as irresponsible cynicism., and boasted that the recent passage of health care reform might dispel it.

“They [Republicans] still believe cynicism will prevail, that the government can’t do anything, that we’re a bunch of socialists – all these things you hear. I think the healthcare debate put a big stake in the heart of that argument.”

Have a look at The One’s job approval dating back to inauguration day. 68/12 to start, as I read it, which was no doubt due in part to the huge relief many people felt at having Bush finally out of office. The new golden age of competence and clean government was about to be born, remember? If anything, the public cynicism inspired by Dubya made the idiotic rainbows-and-unicorns utopian message of Hopenchange that much easier to sell during the campaign.

But then, via Innocent Bystanders, a funny thing happened.

And then, with unemployment still skyrocketing, we embarked on our long national nightmare of adding a giant new entitlement to our already unsustainable basket of federal benefits. And we did it with backroom deals and arcane parliamentary procedures and pandering to special interests and lots and lots and lots of lying about cost — essentially, the precise opposite of rainbows and unicorns. And we were asked to pretend that everything we know about health-care reform is wrong:

And then, to cap it all off, a nice steamy dump was taken in the Senate on the foundational message of “post-partisanship” upon which Hopenchange was built. So, that’s my wild guess as to where the cynicism really comes from, but I’m open to persuasion on the point. Any takers?