Chain of fools

In the interests of my blood pressure, decided long ago to save my outrage for things that are clearly imminent. So I'm not all that exercised about Obama's new budget even though it's said to offer up the chained CPI on Social Security. Matt thinks it's dangerous but it's not scaring me yet. Looks like just another deal that isn't meant to happen.

It's a budget proposal. A political document that has more to do with messaging than policy. I do agree with Charlie Pierce though. Offering up yet another dismal grand bargain with these kind of optics is stupid politics and reinforces the false choices that should belong solely to the Republicans.

This is what Jim DeMint believes, after a few years in a sweet government job, from which he will derive a sweet government pension, and which enabled him to move sweetly into a quasi-governmental job at which he produces nothing at all except hot air. Nice work if you can get it. This is what they all believe. They believe that the problem with Social Security is that...it...works. This is why any economic compromise with these people is guaranteed to hurt all the wrong people.

I'm guessing the White House consultants decided Obama needed to piss off the liberals to appease the Village elders with a show of making tough choices. That may work. Twitter told me E.J. Dionne loved it. But the hundreds of millions of voters who get their news in 30 minutes on the teevee, all they're going to internalize is newscasters very seriously telling them -- again -- Obama wants to cut Social Security. After he and Joe explicitly promised not to touch Social Security. If there's some eleventy dimensional chess strategy here which leads to energizing the Democratic vote in 2014, I'm not seeing it.