If there’s one thing everyone agrees on in WingNutLand, it’s that credit must never be given to Clinton under any circumstances. Today’s WSJ provides as good an example as one can get:

In fact, the last time Congress showed any budget discipline at all was the last time there was a large deficit, in the mid-1990s. Once “the surplus” arrived, however, both the Clinton Administration and the GOP Congress went back on the sauce, and the spending boom continued in the early Bush years. [link — subscription required]

To make their point, the fucksticks good people of the WSJ provide a graph showing government spending as a percentage of GDP. Fair enough — if that’s the measure they want to use, we say let’s go, baby! Because it may sometimes be difficult to tell exactly what was going year to year from the graph, we provide this handy table. In what year, using the WSJ’s own yardstick, did federal spending increase? (CBO link)

+0.1% in 2001 — some fucking sauce. Of course, that beats having to admit that over the last 25 years the government is at its most fiscally irresponsible when a Republican is in the White House.

Bonus points: From the Department of self-delusion:

A good Washington rule of thumb is that the value of any budget proposal is directly proportional to the screaming in Congress against it. By that measure, and acknowledging the low bar, this is by far the best budget of the Bush era. To make it stick, however, Mr. Bush will have to play hardball and threaten if not cast a veto or two. The sooner the better.

Bush has got as much chance of casting a meaningful veto as Condi Rice does of getting a half decent haircut. [John Stossel] Give us a break! [/John Stossel]