In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.
He's been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on "wasteful spending" on Wednesday.
"You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation," he said recently about the "hard choices" we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.
He reckons he'll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that A.I.G. and G.M. and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever-more-alarmed Chinese.
Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that "the status quo is not acceptable," even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.
I never thought I'd live to type these words without a gun to my head, but: Maureen Dowd is right.
It may just be this once, but still ...
This sin't one of those "signs of the apocalypse" they keep talking about, is it? |