Yesterday, Karl Rove had a piece in the Wall Street Journal called “Obama’s Fiscal Fantasy World,” showing Obama as the big spender and irresponsible president that he is.

However, I think the Obama administration’s record is bad enough on its own that we don’t need to distort the truth about what happened on the budget side during President Bush’s two terms in office. Yet, that’s what Rove does. For instance, he writes: “So discretionary domestic spending now stands at $536 billion, up nearly 24 percent from President George W. Bush’s last full year budget in fiscal 2008 of $433.6 billion.”

Here, Rove conveniently omits the last fiscal year of President Bush’s second term (FY2009). He defines the two terms as lasting seven years instead of eight. That’s wrong. To be sure, Bush had a Democratic Congress that year and some of the spending for FY2009 was added by Obama after he took office. Yet, the bulk of the FY2009 spending was Bush’s responsibility.

Besides, as Chris Edwards writes this morning in a letter to the WSJ: “Well, overall nominal spending jumped 60 percent during that period, or more than twice the 27 percent increase under Democrat Bill Clinton.”

Also, Mr. Rove blames Clinton for a 16 percent increase in his last year and says that President Bush cut that in half when it took control of the White House.

I would like to remind Mr. Rove that this is still an 8 percent increase. Imagine how great it would be to get an 8 percent wage increase. Yet, most years, we don’t. So why do we think it is a sign of good government when the federal government gets that type of budget increase?

Plus, in Clinton’s last year, we had a Republican Congress. By Mr. Rove’s preview accounting of presidential terms, he should assume that that last year didn’t exist, or at least that Clinton should be accountable for it.

As I say, based on his first year in office, President Obama looks terrible, and worse than any other president before him. There is no need to use misleading data about President Bush’s record to make that point. That can only hurt our goal.