Loving Barack's Budget

Everyone loves President O's budget, so I've decided to love it too.  From the Left (Paul Krugman) and from the Right (Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks), hosannas ring out.  Its clarity is admired, its willingness to count that which must be counted (the costs of the wars, for example), its visionary embrace of health care reform and energy research -- all good.

Why should I be special?  Why don't I just love it too?  Well, I do love it.  That's what I'm saying. I love it because it is a quintessentially American budget, and I'm a quintessential American. Indeed, I've been an American my entire life, even during the Bush 43 years.

You're waiting for the other shoe to drop.  The other shoe will not drop.  Prez O, after all, inherited this steaming pile of economic doo-doo from his truly, monumentally incompetent predecessor, the aforementioned W.  The $1.75 trillion deficit is Bush's fault; at least $1 trillion of it was inevitable after Bush, and that's without regard to the stimulus bill, which is also Bush's fault because he drove the economy into a ditch. 

In fact, everything is Bush's fault.  Let's just stipulate that and move on.  Anything which can be blamed on Bush, should be blamed on Bush, because he was just awful.  Maybe what we need in America are periodic "Hate Sessions," as in Nineteen Eight-Four.  Remember? The government (Big Brother) would display a picture of the armies of Eurasia or Emanuel Goldstein on TV screens, and workers in Oceania would get up from their desks and scream "Hate! Hate!" for a few minutes.  Could we put Bush's stupid visage up on a few thousand Jumbo-Trons around the country and try that?  I know, I know -- not very bipartisan.  The gentle Barack would never go for it, and he's right.  There's no telling where that kind of energy might lead, you know?  I sense there's a great deal of pent-up rage in this country.

But the budget, the budget.  It's just great.  Bear in mind that we start with a basic template that already allocates 64% of the discretionary budget to the military, homeland security, the nuclear program at the Department of Energy, all the spy agenices, and interest on that part of the national debt attributable to past military spending.  So we have only 36% of the discretionary budget (outside of the entitlement programs) to fool around with in the first place.  And Barack moves this around in nice ways.

That's what being a progressive President is, these days.  Moving the 36% around so some goes to good stuff like energy research and forming committees to see if we can try and get our for-profit medical system to cooperate a little and maybe bring down their premiums a little so we have fewer than 50 million people without health insurance, like maybe just 10 or 20 million, like a civilized country.  Okay, not exactly like a civilized country, but like the old United States.

Let's face it, being the world's mightiest military power is what we do.  We're not going to change that.  President Obama's budget increases military spending a little, because, you know, the world just keeps getting more dangerous all the time.  Ann Coulter, noted defense analyst, is right.  Anyone who doesn't want to spend as much as we do is an unrealistic, unpatriotic Liberal.  We should spend more, really, because the world is counting on us to do all of the military work on a global basis, and we pretty much do that all the time.  In point of fact, other than a few lapses, such as overthrowing liberal, democratically elected presidents in Third World countries because they posed a threat to the United Fruit Co., Standard Oil or ITT, we operate with pretty good restraint.  Noam Chomsky can rave on, but the fact is that probably no other country, with this much power, would use it as responsibly as we do.

I'm not sure what that proves, either, but it looks and sounds kind of nice.  Ann Coulter might be after my phone number after that line.  If she calls, I will just tell her to give O a break for once.  He's surging the troops in Afghanistan, he's going to negotiate for a long-term garrison in Iraq, he's increasing military spending.  So what if he believes in global warming?  That doesn't make him a bad person.  And this health care reform no doubt will stagger out of the committee room stiff-legged, arms thrust forward at shoulder level, its head all stitched up, like the Frankenstein monster it will no doubt be.  Ann and Rush and Bill O'Reilly can take heart in the certainty that medical care will remain out of reach for America's losers, the way it should.

Anyway, Prez O, count me in.  I'm back on the bus.  Or the high speed train, zipping down to the free medical clinic located just across the New Urban plaza from the solar panel farm.