Scalpel and Mirrors

Obama's Press Office has announced his upcoming "Terminations, Reductions, and Savings in the 2010 Budget" to be released Thursday, mentioning about 17 billion in cuts he wants amidst a trillion plus budget request. Just don't call it a hatchet.

In essence these cuts--half in the military--are actually a good example of 'spreading the wealth around'. In normal reality cuts mean something has actually been cut whereas in Obama land we have cuts with the budget ballooning to several trillion. In Washington reality this is known as Obama robbing from Peter to pay Paul. The carnival horses are colorful and pretty.

Everyone knows, or should know, that our Lady of the House will have the final say on things. For instance, Obama could plead, "the EVEN START program needs to go, it's not accomplishing anything" (imagine the juicy red meat for conservative tea partiers!) but Madam Pelosi could poop the party and say, "that's just not going to happen, but about those military cuts? They are just peachy".

Would Obama then risk political capital by vetoing the bill? Not for all the tea bags in China. No, he happily takes his military cuts and shifts the money into other social programs and thumps his chest about fiscal discipline while blaming Bush for everything else.

MORE 5/7/09

If this wasn't Obama it would be quite stunning:

And he told journalists directly that they should stress the fact that the cuts are "significant" – a surprisingly direct appeal to reporters concerning which angle they should take in their coverage.

"It is important, though, for all of you, as you're writing up these stories, to recognize that $17 billion taken out of our discretionary, non-defense budget, as well as portions of our defense budget, are significant," he said. "They mean something." (Here's the White House report on the cuts.)

Guess it's getting pretty bad when CBS News points this stuff out.