… has long been suspect, as readers of National Review’s “The Real Reagan Record” will appreciate. But how about this: He asks, What would the deficit look like without George W. Bush’s fiscal indiscipline? And then he puts the Iraq War in the liabilities side of Bush’s balance sheet.

Okay … John Kerry was not the Democrats’ nominee for president in 2004? Harry Reid is not the Senate majority leader? Joe Biden is not vice president? The Democrats in the House somehow were stripped of their constitutional powers over appropriations? Dianne Feinstein is just a bad dream? Chris Dodd is just a Fig Newton of our amalgamation figment of our imagination? Tom Harkin just a hologram on C-SPAN? Whatever you think about the relative merits of having deposed Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, Bush did not exactly charge in single-handedly.

Nancy Pelosi could have stopped spending money on the Iraq War in January of 2007, if she’d wanted to.

This is an ongoing beef of mine with the way the budget is reported. Clinton surplus? No, Gingrich surplus. Reagan deficits? How about Tip O’Neill deficits? The president does not control the budget; Congress does, with the stronger hand belonging to the House. Always been that way. Perhaps Prof. Krugman would like to take $8.80 of his Nobel money and buy a copy of the book that I believe should be the standard civics text in every high-school classroom in America.