A REALITY CHECK FOR A LAME WASHINGTON ESTABLISHMENT TALKING POINT: From the comments to my Tea Party column in the Washington Examiner:

And how many times did you take to the streets to protest the deficit during the Bush presidency? I’m guessing zero.

You see this kind of thing pop up in comments a lot, and sometimes even out of the mouth of the less-honest variety of pundit. Which means, of course, that once again it’s time to roll out this graphic:

Notice anything? Like maybe how Bush’s deficits are dwarfed by Obama’s? And maybe how the deficit was falling throughout Bush’s second term? Until the very end, when TARP — hardly popular with the Tea Party crowd — rolled out. The “Bush was as big a spender as Obama” line is just a flat-out lie, which the apologists for the powers that be hope you’ll buy because . . . well, because a lie is pretty much all they’ve got at this point.

Related: The White House will predict a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year and more big shortfalls for the next decade in its upcoming budget proposal, a congressional source told Reuters on Sunday.