The Washington Post, alas, gets this editorial wrong in the very first sentence:

NO ONE LIKES to be the bearer of bad news — especially when it could threaten your multibillion-dollar health-care reform bill.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: considering the amount of time that the Right’s bloggers, pundits, and legislators have spent explaining why the Democrats in Congress needed to institute a Stop spending money we don’t have, you idiots policy, well.  We do live here, too, so our liking is hardly unalloyed – but we did say that this wasn’t going to work*.  Moving on:

And so the Obama administration did not exactly rush to publish yesterday’s required mid-session update to its federal budget estimates of last February. Still, once the numbers finally emerged in the dog days of August, they retained the power to stun: Instead of a cumulative $7.1 trillion deficit over the next decade, the White House now projects a $9 trillion deficit. These figures imply average annual budget deficits greater than 4 percent of gross domestic product through fiscal 2019, a rate of debt accumulation faster than projected GDP growth. This is not a sustainable fiscal path.

That passage is accurate enough, as far as it goes – one wonders if the Washington Post is still happy that it endorsed this state of affairs by endorsing the current President, but newspapers have a long history of not needing to repudiate their bad judgment calls – and so is its conclusion (again: Stop spending money we don’t have, you idiots).  But I’d like to take this opportunity to remind the Washington Post that if the Bush administration was ‘irresponsible’ in passing last year’s bailout, he’s in excellent company.  Never forget that this bill only passed on the second try, and with a minority of Republican votes even after some epic arm-twisting.

As it happens, I don’t particularly want to yell at either the President or Congressional Democrats for making what was at the time an emergency judgment call.  But I’ll be damned if I’ll let Bush take exclusive blame for it, either.

MoeLane

*And, for everybody about to complain about how bad the GOP was, here:

Apparently, when the Democrats complained about ‘out of control deficits’ they meant out of their control. They’ve certainly made up for it since 2007, huh?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.