But We Still Haven't Hit Rock Bottom Yet

Hey, between the Manchin-Toomey gun-control compromise, and the president's new budget, we've got...an entire loaf.

Oh, and feel free to shoot me now.

"We're not going to have the White House forever, folks. If he doesn't do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years," said a longtime Obama aide, referring to the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate who proposed a sweeping overhaul of Medicare that would replace some benefits with vouchers.

Who thinks this way? More to the point, who in the White House ever has thought this way? And what kind of a four-toed idiot gives this quote to a reporter, even anonymously?

[...]

There is only one reason for anyone in the White House to adopt this rationale, and there is only one reason for anyone in the White House to float this rationale in public. The only plausible reason for adopting this rationale, or for floating it in public, is because this is what you really want to do in the first place and you are groping for a plausible alibi. The only plausible reason for it is that you've bought the deficit-hysteria to the point where you believe that you have to do this thing right now. Nothing else makes sense, unless the White House mess has changed where it shops for its mushrooms.

[...]

There's more in the budget proposal that's pretty damned bad. ("Overhauling" the corporate tax code "in a way that doesn't generate additional revenue"? I will now shave my eyeballs with a lemon zester.) I will yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from New Jersey on the most egregious of those. But my money's still on this budget being exactly what this president wants. Or on the mushrooms.

  Charlie Pierce