Job Recession: The White House has gotten into the habit of blaming everything on Republicans. Nowhere is that more evident — or mistaken — than in the debate over the extension of jobless benefits.

President Obama, for example, leveled an attack Monday at Republican lawmakers, essentially saying they were denying extended unemployment benefits for millions of jobless Americans. "It's time to do what's right, not for the next election, but for the middle class," he said, implying that the GOP's only concern was politics.

We're not surprised. It's in the grand tradition of political bad-mouthing to claim the opposition is heartless and hateful. But the president forgets: It was the Democrats who insisted on a new system for budgeting, to make sure the deficit didn't grow. Republicans, in fact, support the $34 billion extension of jobless benefits; they just want Congress to find an equivalent amount in cuts, as required by the Democrats' own rules.

Remember last February? Trying to convince Americans they were the fiscally responsible party — despite pushing the U.S. deficit to $1.4 trillion, or 10% of GDP, and adding trillions to our nation's debt — Democrats passed a "Pay-Go" law requiring that any added spending would be offset with cuts.

They got a lot of political mileage out of that. But before the ink on the bill was dry, they began ignoring it, spending more on health care, aid to the states, jobless benefits, expansion of the child tax credit and government loan programs for small businesses, among other goodies, with no cuts.

In short, they had it both ways — posing as deficit-cutters while at the same time spending vast sums of money on various forms of "stimulus." As we all know, the Keynesian stimulus has been a tragic failure, denying millions of Americans the right to meaningful work by killing off the economic growth that is the source of an expanding work force and rising wages.

Yet, incredibly, Obama's vice president now blames Republicans for the stimulus' failure. "In order to get what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes," Joe Biden said Sunday, arguing the $862 billion stimulus was "too small" because only three Republicans supported it.

Too small? For the record, Obama's own original estimates saw a stimulus of $775 billion to $800 billion, with unemployment topping out at 8%. Well, the stimulus was $862 billion, and today unemployment is 9.5%. We're still down 3.1 million jobs since the Democrats gained control of the entire federal government, and 7.5 million since the recession began.

The math behind this isn't pretty. The liberal Brookings Institution now puts the "job gap" at nearly 11.3 million — its estimate of "the number of jobs it would take to return to employment levels from before the Great Recession, while also accounting for the 125,000 people who enter the labor force."

So far this year, we've added about 100,000 jobs a month. But as Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein notes, even at 200,000 new jobs a month, it'll take 12.5 years to just get back to even. So much for Biden's hokey "Recovery Summer."

The New York Times, in a headline Monday, asks: "Mystery for the White House: Where Did the Jobs Go?"

What's mysterious about it? The jobs were sucked into a vortex of expanding regulation, rising taxes, soaring spending, government takeovers of key industries, and surging deficits and debts that have created mass uncertainty among businesses and the entrepreneurial class that does most of the hiring.

Name-calling is no substitute for the ugly truth: The Democrats' stimulus policies have failed miserably.