The Romney video

Mitt Romney’s getting a lot of heat for his expressions of utter indignation that people could “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.  That that’s an entitlement.”  Let them eat cake!

It’s all good fun, of course, to see standard conservative dogma caught this way.  But anyone who follows US politics shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised.  The Republicans have been at war against the New Deal and Great Society “entitlements” since well before Barry Goldwater, it’s not really news.

There can be no doubt that for the bottom 90%, the Republicans are the greater of two evils.  But, sadly, it’s not that simple.  Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report puts it quite well, I think, when he concludes that Barack Obama and his ilk of Democrats are “the more effective evil”.  Just as only Nixon could make peace with China, only the Democrats can cut “entitlements”.  The Republicans can’t do it by themselves – it’s far too unpopular.  A Democratic regime in power that seeks to cut these programs though becomes a very great danger and is therefore “the more effective evil”.

Down these lines, economist Dean Baker poses a useful question today in an article entitled “Does President Obama Want to Cut Social Security by 3%”?  Obama, Baker notes, has come out in support of the Bowles-Simpson plan which seeks to cut Social Security by actually quite a bit more than 3% through tightening the cost of living formula and raising the retirement age.

Why is it, asks Baker, that so few people are aware of Obama’s intentions?

One of the reasons that the media may be neglecting its responsibilities in this situation is that many of them favor the cuts laid out in the Bowles-Simpson plan. They don’t want to put the Obama Administration on the spot because they know that Social Security is hugely popular across the political spectrum.

The answer to Baker’s question about Obama’s intentions, though, is glaringly obvious.  The New York Times after all reported about a month ago that “(Obama) particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security.”  And, in a detailed narration of Obama’s horrid negotiations with Speaker Boehner last summer, the Times tells us that:

 The White House agreed to cut at least $250 billion from Medicare in the next 10 years and another $800 billion in the decade after that, in part by raising the eligibility age. The administration had endorsed another $110 billion or so in cuts to Medicaid and other health care programs, with $250 billion more in the second decade. And in a move certain to provoke rebellion in the Democratic ranks, Obama was willing to apply a new, less generous formula for calculating Social Security benefits, which would start in 2015.

So Baker’s question seems just rhetorical – his real point is that Obama’s getting away with misleading the American people; he’s effectively lying and the media’s complicit.

We can laugh all we want at Romney but the far greater stink and far greater evil is the fantastic fraud existing within the hopelessly corrupt Democratic Party.  Barack Obama, like every post war Democratic president who preceded him, possibly excepting Kennedy – Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton – is a con man working against the interests of the average American.  True progress will begin when the majority of people start realizing it.

Speaking of candid video clips, this short one of Bill Clinton chatting conspiratorially with Paul Ryan under Roman style columns at the right wing Peter Peterson Institute last year deserves much more attention.  It’s far dirtier, in my opinion, than the Romney one.