If, like Pinocchio, a politician’s proboscis grew each time he lied, the world would be overtaken by noses flopping about everywhere.

Congressional Budget Office figures, cited by the Wall Street Journal, are finessed. US debt problem is worse than CBO projections.

Still the amount of lying Obama manages is quite impressive:

Obama’s claim that “federal spending since [he] took office has risen at the slowest pace of any President in almost 60 years,” is audacious. (And yes, Bush set the example.) It’s “like an alcoholic claiming that his rate of drinking has slowed because he had only 22 beers today and 25 beers yesterday. (WSJ)

Notwithstanding that GDP measures include the Brownian Motion of debt growth, “Prior to Mr. Obama, the U.S. had not spent more than 23.5% of GDP—that was in 1983, amid the Reagan defense buildup—since the end of World War II. Yet Mr. Obama has managed to exceed that four years in a row: 25.2% in 2009, 24.1% in 2010 and 2011, and an estimated 24.3% in 2012, up from a range between 18%-21% from 1994-2008.”

Mr. Obama can fairly blame $1 trillion or so of the $5 trillion debt increase of the last four years on Mr. Bush. But what about the other $4 trillion? Debt held by the public now stands at 74.2% of the economy, up from 40.5% at the end of 2008—and rising rapidly.

To put it in the most charitable terms, the claim made by the emissaries of the liberal media—“MSNBC , liberal blogs, newspapers and even the Wall Street Journal”—that “Federal spending under Obama [is] at historic lows” is counterintuitive. Surprise, surprise: In charting the evidence for their claims, these sources are lying:

“It turns out,” writes Ann Coulter, in “Figures don’t lie – Democrats do,” that “Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.

That’s not a joke.”

Nutting’s “analysis” is so dishonest, even the New York Times has ignored it. He includes only the $140 billion of stimulus money spent after Oct. 1, 2009, as Obama’s spending. And he’s testy about that, grudgingly admitting that Obama “is responsible (along with the Congress) for about $140 billion in extra spending in the 2009 fiscal year from the stimulus bill.”
Nutting acts as if it’s the height of magnanimity to “attribute that $140 billion in stimulus to Obama and not to Bush. …”
On what possible theory would that be Bush’s spending? Hey – we just found out that Obamacare’s going to cost triple the estimate. Let’s blame it on Calvin Coolidge!
But Obama didn’t come in and live with the budget Bush had approved. He immediately signed off on enormous spending programs that had been specifically rejected by Bush. This included a $410 billion spending bill Bush had refused to sign before he left office. Obama signed it on March 10, 2009. Bush had been chopping brush in Texas for two months at that point. Marketwatch’s Nutting says that’s Bush’s spending.

Of course, Ann Coulter is still a Bush baby. The factual information she offers in “Figures don’t lie – Democrats do” notwithstanding, Coulter is making the standard excuses for Genghis B., who set the pace for Obama.

She ignores that the two presidents, Bush and Obama, coexist on “a continuum of criminality.”

The correct, cynical tone about Obama-Bush comparisons was taken in, dare I say, “Obama And Bush: Partners In Government Giganticism“?

Moocher Obama has pulled ahead of Looter Bush with respect to deficits and debt. The Bush budget for 2009 was a trivial $3 trillion, while Obama’s 2010 budget was a respectable $3.5 trillion. According to “Bankrupting America,” “Bush doubled the debt to almost $6 trillion and Obama’s plans would leave us with an IOU of an additional $8.5 trillion by 2020.”
C’mon. Six trillion; 8 trillion: the act of racking up such financial liabilities exists on a continuum of criminality ? it does not constitute a difference in kind (or in “core values”).

UPDATE I: LIARS ALL. There is structural lying in all government accounting (via Lou Dobbs).

UPDATE II: TORTURED DATA. “Federal spending has risen at its lowest pace” under his administration, claims BHO. “Torture data enough and it’ll confess,” quipped Stephen Moore, of the Wall Street Journal, to Fox Business’ Gerri Willis.