You know things have gotten pretty ironic when it is the Libertarians defending Obama.

What wasn’t ironic was the attack from Fox News that prompted the defense — their article “Obama Shatters Spending Record for First-Year Presidents” (which was promptly picked up by the Drudge Report):

President Obama has shattered the budget record for first-year presidents — spending nearly double what his predecessor did when he came into office and far exceeding the first-year tabs for any other U.S. president in history. In fiscal 2009 the federal government spent $3.52 trillion … That fiscal year covered the last three-and-a-half months of George W. Bush’s term and the first eight-and-a-half months of Obama’s.

Then, hypocritically but not surprisingly, Karl Rove piles on with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, where he has the chutzpah to accuse Obama of “engineering an unprecedented spending surge”. Rove conveniently ignores that as Bush’s senior advisor, he was the engineer while Bush was increasing the national debt more than all the previous presidents put together.

But it did surprise me that it was an article on the Cato Institute website that points out the obvious lie being told by Rove and Fox News — that the fiscal year they are complaining about started in October 2008, so “the vast majority of the spending for that year was the result of Bush Administration policies”. Even if you blame Obama for the Stimulus Bill (the need for which was caused by the economic collapse during the Bush administration), S-CHIP, Cash-for-clunkers, and other additional spending approved after Obama took office, then Bush is still responsible for 96% of the spending that Fox News and Rove are blaming on Obama.