Debunking The Lie Of Obama’s “Deficit Explosion”

One of the most deliberate and pernicious lies of the Republican Party is that Barack Obama is a big spender who is rapidly increasing the federal deficit.  Even some former GOP colleagues who certainly ought to know better have bleated this lie on Facebook - apparently as a result of drinking too much GOP Kool-Aid and watching too much Fox News.   And, of course, in direct contrast these very same Republicans were cheer leaders for the explosion of the national debt under George W. Bush who took the country from a surplus to $10 trillion in debt.   Debt that Obama has steadily been reducing over the last 4 years as shown by the chart above.    For Republicans, the truth simply no longer matters.  And ironically, the growing GOP disregard for the truth tracks directly with the rise of the Christofascists and Tea Party in the GOP.   Andrew Sullivan describes the situation this way:

It’s more than a lie. It’s actually the reverse of the truth. Since 1980, it’s the Republicans who have consistently destroyed our fiscal health and Democrats who have had to restore it. Fiscal conservatives take note.

The propaganda line of the GOP from the very first months – as the deficit inevitably soared in the wake of an inherited super-recession – was that the Democrats are once again the party of deficits and debt. But when you look at the trajectory over Obama’s full term, you find something a little different:

Now look at George W. Bush’s record on deficits over his eight years:

The political implications for 2014, when the GOP will be unable to use the deficit or unemployment as issues as they have done for so long … are potentially far more potent than any current scandals.

Again, I trace the rise in GOP dishonesty and the party's general descent into insanity directly to the rise of the Christofascists and their cousins in the Tea Party (some 85% of the Tea Party members describe themselves as conservative Christian) .  The result is that the party that wraps itself in religiosity has indicated that in their warped alternate universe, vicious, deliberate lying is apparently a Judea-Christian value.