The He Who Smelt it Dealt it of Political BS

White House spokesman Jay Carney has floated a new Obama campaign theme, President Barack Obama, fiscal conservative. I'll give you a few minutes to clean up whatever you just spit out after reading that. That's right, the Obama campaign is running with the blatant lie that President Obama has been fiscally responsible. Now, I'm not going to argue that prior Republican presidents have been fiscally conservative by any stretch. That's often hard to do when Democrats renig on their promises to make cuts in exchange for tax raises as they did with President Bush the elder and Ronald Reagan.

But Mr. Carney called it "BS" to listen to people who think President Obama has been spending irresponsibly. The President, ever one to assure that the truth is stringently adhered to, said he couldn't understand how Republicans have been "bamboozeling" people into believing they are the party of fiscal responsibility and the Democrats have to come in to clean up their mess. In fact, he further went on to note that since he became President, federal spending has risen at it's lowest rate in nearly 60 years. Amazingly, he got all of this out without his pants catching fire, being struck by lightning, his nose growing into a pole vault, or bursting into laughter.

Where, pray tell, did they get support for such an insane proposition? The Wall Street Journal's Market Watch contributor Rex Nutting. Perhaps he should consider knocking the last four letters off his name.

The problem with Mr. Nutting's figures? He places all 2009 spending on President Bush. This includes the stimulus (which we all remember President Bush passing, right?), the bailouts, the propping up of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, TARP, etc. Mr. Nutting ignores these one-time spending items and just calls them part of the last Bush budget. That way, the additional $1.45 trillion is considered the baseline for comparison of Mr. Obama's non-emergency spending budgets. This might explain how the "0.4% budget increase" Mr. Nutting finds somehow resulted in an additional $5 trillion in debt, more than President Bush racked up in eight years. Fact is, the budget has increased at a whopping average of 8% per year according to Charles Krauthammer.

But never mind all that, President Obama is a fiscal conservative, unicorns exist, puppies fart gold dust which is collected by the Fed to back up the dollar, I'm Shaquille O'Neal...well, you get the picture. I probably shouldn't be too upset about this. It's not like the President isn't lying most of the time.