Dirty DC Secret

Heracles taming Cerberus. Athenian red-figure amphora, c. 520-510 BC. Paris. Musée du Louvre F204 © Musée du Louvre. Via.

Dear terrorized-left friends who are fond of telling us how Obama "wants to cut Social Security", here is your reading assignment: an article by Jackie Calmes in today's Times explaining that nobody wants to cut Social Security:

“It’s a lot harder than you’d think to find Republicans who’d actually want to cut entitlements, or Democrats who want to raise taxes,” said Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and now a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The only person who seems to have consistently been interested in a grand bargain is the president, and frankly I’m not even sure about him.”

Bernstein's just being polite; Obama doesn't want to do it either. He just wants to appear to be properly deferential to Mr. Petersen and his legions of crazed budget balancers, and the Village Party, which commands few votes but a lot of TV, and its ancillary good-for-John-McCain gossips.

It suddenly occurs to me that perhaps FDR's budget-balancery was all an act too; just something to toss at J. Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller the way you toss Cerberus a honey-soaked bun when you want to burglarize the Underworld.

It's amazing to me that people who are willing to suspect the president of lying about virtually everything he does insist they can tell from his vague statements of sympathy with Bowles and Simpson that he must be a passionate advocate of their stupid proposals. Have they really not noticed how every time he signs off on a plan to cut, say, Medicare, it turns out in the fine print that nobody's benefits were touched and the program ends up healthier than before?

Just don't tell the Republicans.