Did you know that there's a website, maintained by the Bureau of Public Debt, that shows our national debt to the penny? I didn't until today.

Of course, it shows that the national debt has risen steadily.

The interesting thing to me, though, is that it shows that the national debt rose steadily through the Clinton years, too:

09/29/2000..........$5,674,178,209,886.86
09/30/1999..........$5,656,270,901,615.43
09/30/1998..........$5,526,193,008,897.62
09/30/1997..........$5,413,146,011,397.34
09/30/1996..........$5,224,810,939,135.73
09/29/1995..........$4,973,982,900,709.39
09/30/1994..........$4,692,749,910,013.32
09/30/1993..........$4,411,488,883,139.38
09/30/1992..........$4,064,620,655,521.66

Now, I don't pretend to understand the deficit, the government's spending operations, or any of this. I defer to those with a better grasp on it than I have. Like this guy and this guy. However, I do know that, in our family, if our debts are going up and up and up, we don't talk about how much extra money we have.

Here's my point: All we've heard from the Democrats and the media is that Bush has wasted this wonderful national surplus that Clinton had stockpiled for us. Can somebody explain to me, in simple terms, how we had such a wonderful surplus during the Clinton years if our national debt increased by the hundreds of billions during every year of Clinton's presidency?

It's odd, too, that nobody was running around in the 90's talking about how our country had it's largest national debt ever under Clinton... when, in fact, that was the case. I suppose that the liberals had a better understanding of relativity then than they do now.

Clinton wasn't fighting a war... he wasn't rebuilding cities after hurricanes... and yet, during his presidency, the debt went up and up and up.

Liberals (the especially nutty ones, anyway) accuse the Bush White House of trying to scare us all to death with "phantoms" called terrorists. Meanwhile, the Democrats try to scare us to death with a "phantom" called the deficit. The obvious difference, I suppose, is that the deficit didn't do this:

I ain't no economist, but I know BS when I smell it.

What deficit?

What Clinton surplus?