"were you raising red flags when we went from budget surpluses under clinton to budget deficits topping 700 billion?"
Sort of.
Yeah Clinton had a surplus - the so-called "peace dividend" - remember ol' Bill and Al Gore with their press conference to announce the peace dividend and they had charts and Al was all aglow. Remember "peace" had broken out all across the world after the Cold War, so much so that the Clinton Administration cut the military budget significantly.
And I was one of many conservatives here and elsewhere that had big problems with Bush's inability to veto a bill. To be fair, I think, following 9/11, you had to imagine that we would increase federal spending on national security issues.
To be honest, I think the spending on the Iraq war was a thorny issue - there was little resistance to Congress' initial authorization for spending on the war because most everyone accepted the Administration's rationale for gooing to war. Again, to be fair, I think that you had to expect a significant increase in spending for a military operation of some size given the reaction to 9/11.
And the thing that makes me really wonder is how libs can point to Bush's deficit when Obama has eclipsed that in his first 6 mos. I'm not saying two wrongs make a right. I'm just wondering how it was such a big deal then, but not now?