Barack Obama: Shoestring president

Spending has grown more slowly under Obama than either Reagan or Bush. Will the media stop parroting the GOP?

Updated with video below.

With so many Republican lies about President Obama, it’s pretty hard to pick out the worst one. The most vicious stuff, of course, comes from the crazy birthers, who won’t go away. (Way to spend Arizona’s tax dollars, Sheriff Joe Arpaio!) Then there are the more mainstream slurs – Newt Gingrich calling him “the food stamp president,” or Obama’s “friend” Sen. Tom Coburn saying he favors government programs because “as an African American male,” he received “tremendous advantage from a lot of these programs.”

But if you measure the power of a lie by its utter truthlessness combined with the breadth of its reach, the notion that Obama has presided over a wild federal spending spree is probably the biggest whopper spread by the GOP, with the help of the right-wing noise machine and lazy mainstream media. Mitt Romney regularly rails against the “debt and spending inferno” the president supposedly ignited. Last month on Fox, Charles Krauthammer called Obama’s spending “radical, unprecedented,” and CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller reported that the “National debt has increased more under Obama than under Bush.” Read more.....