Coming soon to a Republican campaign ad near you:
"The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic." - Barack Obama, July 3, 2008
CBS News, August 23, 2011:
The latest posting by the Treasury Department shows the national debt has now increased $4 trillion on President Obama's watch. The debt was $10.626 trillion on the day Mr. Obama took office. The latest calculation from Treasury shows the debt has now hit $14.639 trillion. It's the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. president.
The national debt increased $4.9 trillion during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. The debt now is rising at a pace to surpass that amount during Mr. Obama's four-year term...The Gross National Debt now stands at 97.6 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product - the total value of goods and services produced by labor and property in the U.S.
I'll also hasten to add that President Obama submitted a 2012 budget that would have piled nearly $10 Trillion of new red ink atop the already towering national debt over the next decade -- despite its $2 Trillion in proposed tax increases. If it hadn't been unanimously rejected by the Senate, Obama's fiscal blueprint would have more than doubled the national debt compared to the day he took office. If 2008's Barack Obama indignantly declared President Bush's $4 trillion debt increase over two full terms (accrued at an annual deficit clip of roughly $300 Billion per year) "unpatriotic," one wonders what pejorative he might have employed to describe his own policies less than three years later. Instead, as body-snatcher Obama is wont to do, he'll ignore it.
But don't you dare challenge his patriotism, you racist. Plus, it's no use; Democrats have the patriotism-questioning market cornered at the moment anyway. After all, we all know what "real" patriotism looks like.
UPDATE - "Every man, woman and child's" share of the national debt is now $47,000 -- about a 50 percent increase since Obama took the helm.