Conservatives are getting all worked up about the “food stamp president” again. But now they're not just talking about President Obama. They're also talking about former President Bush.

Hard to believe? It shouldn't be. It's just one more sign of how extreme mainstream conservatives and their Republican allies have become.

The argument comes as congressional Republicans are on a crusade to slash funding for food stamps, which is now known as Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). Just this week, the House Agriculture Committee approved a bill reauthorizing the program but at substantially reduced funding levels, so that 2 to 3 million low-income Americans, many of them children, would lose assistance. That bill isn’t likely to become law, but SNAP was a target for major cuts in the original House Republican budget and it will likely to remain a target of conservative attacks for some time.

The immediate impetus for this assault is the program’s growth. One in 50 Americans were part of the program at its inception. One in seven are today. For a while, conservatives were content to blame Obama for this increase, because a lot of that growth took place during his tenure. Conservatives are particularly angry about a provision in the Recovery Act suspending time limits on benefits that served, in effect, as a work requirement.

But there was a good reason to suspend the work requirement in early 2009: People couldn’t find work! As the Congressional Bugdet Office has concluded, the primary reason for recent enrollment increases is the recession and its aftermath. Many more people have been out of work or losing incomes. As a result, many more have needed financial assistance in order to put food on the table.