Barack Obama, imaginary president

Under President Bush in eight years we added $4.9 trillion to the national debt. Under President Obama in four years we have added more than $6 trillion. The debt limit will be raised again this month. If Obama has his way, it will be raised unconditionally. Raising the debt limit unconditionally is a matter of deep principle, or something.

For a current take on the debt number see Terry Jeffrey’s account of the last Daily Treasury Statement for fiscal 2013. I am borrowing from PolitiFact’s August 2012 assessment of New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte’s critique of Obama. The debt numbers calculated by the Treasury are posted here.

Obama can’t be the same guy who went around the country a few years ago calling out George Bush for the increase in the national debt that occurred under Bush’s watch. Almost unbelievably, we can go to the tape, right there on YouTube, deriving from a July 3, 2008, campaign appearance in Fargo, North Dakota.

The fellow on the video can be heard to say: “The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents — number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child.”

He even went so far as to say: “That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”

Surely the guy who seeks the current unconditional increase in the national debt as a matter of deep principle is a figment of our own fevered imagination.

Who is that unmasked man?

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