We’ve seen a meme spreading like a fungus in the press, mostly on the editorial/analysis/commentator side so far, blaming Barack Obama for stock market declines since Inauguration Day. Today, Drudge is pushing a Bloomberg story headlined “‘Obama Bear Market’ Punishes Investors as Dow Slumps.” Um, no. Let’s nip this nonsense in the bud before it gets out of hand.

First of all, let me get it out of the way that I think Obama has done a pretty terrible job on the economy/financial rescue front so far. Who couldn’t have seen that picking Geithner as Treasury Secretary was a mistake (Oh yeah, Wall Street)

And the administration has lurched around from one banking plan to another and none have inspired confidence. In part that’s its fault, but it’s also that, let’s face it, this is a huge, intractable problem for which there is no silver bullet. Its solutions (other than a flawed stimulus and homeowner-bailout plan) haven’t been that different from Bush’s.

But wait a minute. The Dow peaked in October of 2007. The bear market became official (meaning, stocks dropped 20 percent from their peak) in July. The markets started really falling off a cliff in September, when the Bush administration let Lehman fail, AIG and Merill had to be taken over, the Congress voted down the bailout, and Paulson had to switch teams from free marketeer to interventionist. Those events, remember, are what insured Obama’s election in the first place.

The TARP helped keep the boat from completely capsizing, but it’s more like bailing water does than fixing the actual hole in the bottom does. The economy, already in recession since December of 2007, went into freefall after the September crisis and has kept plunging since, shedding more than 600,000 jobs a month. Since the election, we’ve learned that Merrill Lynch blew a probably fatal hole in the side of Bank of America, Citigroup has been left for dead, and General Electric has been on the highway to hell—or the Pink Sheets, anyway. There’s much more in that vein if you have all day.

This is what Messrs. Obama, Geithner, and Summers inherited. Tough gig.

But let’s step even further back a bit. Dude’s been in office six weeks. The stock market is a notoriously impossible-to-predict-or-interpret animal. It goes where it may, for reasons the smartest traders can only guess at.

To put it another way, big secular declines in stocks take years to play out. The Great Depression stock crash didn’t hit bottom until 1933, four years after it started. It seems like the current one has been going on forever, but we’re still only at about 1930 or 1931.

Now, Wall Street certainly doesn’t like that its taxes are going up 3.5 percentage points, but the biggest beefs, what probably really irks CNBC’s Jim Cramer, for instance (who supported Obama’s election), is that his buddies in the hedge-fund, private-equity, and real-estate world are going to have to pay income taxes instead of much-lower capital-gains rates—more than doubling their taxes. This isn’t controversial to anyone outside those industries (why should hedge-fund managers be taxed less than hedge trimmers?), but they have heavy cannon and they’ll fire it until the ink is dry on the tax law.

The press needs to take this into account when reading Wall Street Journal editorials and CNBC reporter Charlie Gasparino’s dribblings in the New York Post (Gasparino foolishly has been blaming the stock declines on Obama since before he was elected).

I pointed yesterday to a Barry Ritholtz rant, which came out before the Bloomberg story, about this same topic, and it’s worth revisiting. He noted that the Nasdaq plunged 33 percent from George W. Bush’s election to March 5 (since that election was still up in the air through December, I calculated it after Inauguration Day, and it was more than 20 percent—which is the threshold of a bear market).

By the idiot squad’s reasoning, the 2000 tech wreck was all George Bush’s fault. Funny, I don’t recall hearing any of that from them in 2000-01.

Ryan Chittum , a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is deputy editor of The Audit, CJR's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu.