The world has truly gone mad

Barack Obama has formally announced a budget which calls for Social Security to be cut via the "chained CPI" mechanism.

Meanwhile, Grover "Drown the Gummint in the Bathtub" Norquist has come out in opposition to chained CPI. His reasons for opposing it may not be your reasons or my reasons, but still: He's against it. Also check out this amazing response by NY Republican Chris Collins. 

Wasn't there an old Warner Brother's cartoon in which suicidal mice chases a cat? I remember it well. At the end, a bulldog observing this reversal of the natural order gets so freaked out that he heads off to the pound. (Update: I've embedded the German-language version, no other being available.)

I'm feeling like that bulldog.

TPM refers to the Obama budget as a "Final Gesture of Good Faith to GOP," to which one reader responded:

How about a gesture of good faith to the people who voted for him?

What infuriates me is that the rightists to whom he made this "good faith" gesture interpret this budget as yet more proof of their "Obama the bolshie" theory. Take it away, Gateway Pundit...

Obama isn’t concerned with our country’s mad dash into the fiscal abyss; he’s relishing it. How else can one explain his newly released $3.77 Trillion spending plan?

In true Obama-style, his Socialist pie in the sky would be funded through deep punishment to targeted populations...

Every time Obama tries to please everyone he ends up pissing off everyone. He certainly seems to have pissed off Krugman, who hauls out a cynical variant of the "11-dimensional chess" theory of Why Obama Does The Crazy-Ass Things He Does...

Since the beginning, the Obama administration has seemed eager to gain the approval of the grownups — the sensible people who will reward efforts to be Serious, and eventually turn on those nasty, intransigent Republicans as long as Obama and co. don’t cater too much to the hippies.This is the latest, biggest version of that strategy. Unfortunately, it will almost surely fail. Why? Because there are no grownups — only people who try to sound like grownups, but are actually every bit as childish as anyone else.

It's true that the Republicans are intransigent and nutty. But Obama must be just as nutty if he thinks that he can appeal to a mythical center in a world where the center does not hold.

Obama’s budget will garner faint praise at best, quickly followed by denunciations of the president for not supplying the Leadership (TM) to make Republicans compromise — which means that he’s just as much at fault as they are, see?

Fortunately, Congress makes the sausage. We must redouble our efforts to make sure chained CPI goes nowhere.

And then we must redouble our efforts to find leaders who can recall what FDR stood for.

A final note: Let's take another look at what Chris Collins had to say.

“If you change the calculation of the consumer price index and how you calculate inflation, that’s going to continue to pinch our seniors who, come the end of the month, the stories I hear, are having trouble putting food on the table,” Collins said.

So far, so good. But, being a Republican, Collins can't resist a quick dive into the Pond of Wacky:

“He [Obama] doesn’t think we have a spending problem. He thinks we have a revenue problem and the cuts he’s making are on the backs of our seniors,” Collins said.

Newsflash, Chris: The money paid to seniors counts as spending. It sure as hell ain't revenue. Collins is putting the matter backwards, hoping that no-one will notice.

By the way -- what we have here is both a revenue and a spending problem. If we were taking in the same revenues we did under Clinton (before Dubya instituted tax cuts for the rich), we'd be in a lot better shape. If we hadn't spent trillions on Dubya's damned wars (not to mention all of those Red State pork projects and handouts to the Wall Streeters), the federal budget's bottom line would be printed in an ink even blacker than the ichor that coursed through Dick Cheney's old heart.