Simply put, none of this is true or even bears much of a resemblance to the facts. When watching this speech, I knew it could not be true, so I checked with Concord Coalition policy director Joshua Gordon.

"The first part, the $400 billion, I can only surmise she is comparing the final year of the Bush administration with the first year of the Obama administration, just the single year deficit, not the debt," said said Gordon, looking for an explanation.

The problem with that hypothesis was that Bachmann referred to Bush having to deal with 9/11, recessions and two wars, and compared this to just the first year of Obama's administration. This seemed to mean that Bachmann was referring to the sum total of the Bush years, and alleging that Bush only built up $400 billion in debt during his whole administration. "Then that's wrong," Gordon replied.

So what were the actual numbers? And did Obama really build up more debt than all previous presidents combined? "The debt numbers that we normally use are debt held by the public, so that doesn't count the Social Security trust fund," said Gordon. "So if you look at the end of the year, end of calendar year 2000, which is pretty close to the beginning of the Bush term, the debt held by the public was $3.4 trillion. And then by the end of the year 2008, the debt was $5.8 trillion. And then by the end of the year 2009, it was $7.5 trillion. Now that's calendar year 2009, so that pretty much encompasses the first year of the Obama administration."