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Monday, January 25, 2010

Spending Freeze!

You thought it was bad when Jane Hamsher teamed up with Grover Norquist, well now that Obama has done it, too, all hell will break loose! dun-dun-DAH! You gotta love a formulation roll-out so disastrous that the Administration flacks and walk-backers on the teevee are offering up as reassurance variations on, hey, don't worry, it's the opposite of what it sounds like, he doesn't mean it, it's empty verbiage! Nice choice -- presumably either Obama is taking up the idea that lost McCain the Presidency and gave Hoover the credit for making the Depression Great -- or he's just pulling crap out of his ass that he doesn't mean in order to appeal to Republicans who think he's a Satanic Comminazi no matter what he does. You got to hand it to them these last few days, that's some sweet messaging there. Not that our online sky is falling brigade doesn't exacerbate every stumble into an earthquake in two seconds flat anyway. As it happens, I actually don't think this "spending freeze" getting floated sans real details means the direst of the dire things it is being described as meaning, inasmuch as saving the promised 250 billion dollars over a decade doesn't square with Hoover-scaled Budget-hawk cluelessness of the kind signalled by phrases like "budget freeze" so much as squaring with the sorts of efficiencies Obama already managed in this year, stimulus package and all. So this is of course obviously earthshatteringly stupid -- what else could it be, natch -- but possibly not quite as earthshatteringly stupid as the earthshatteringly stupid thing it appears to be. I suspect this is just the latest rather inept episode of White House messaging going zanily depressingly interminably awry since Naked Scotty Brown gave the Republican minority that is still a minority a magical "majority" in the eyes of both parties and preening punditocrats for some odd reason one apparently needs to be a millionaire Washington insider to understand. I guess we'll understand more after the State of the Union and as the actual details arrive next week. If Evan Bayh looks pleased, we're all fucked. I'm pretty sure that's the tell.

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