A Fucking "Spending Freeze"? In A Deep Recession?? WTF Izzat Negro Thinking?

The Left-Blogosphere checks in on the latest economic nostrums proposed by the brain-dead Shamwow regime designed to further damage and humiliate his erstwhile base--or play 11-dimension chess (?, what-ever)--with a three-year spending freeze on SOCIAL programs, while specifically excluding the huge expenses of "defense" (war-making on a planetary scale) from the calculus:

Atrios: "We are ruled by idiots."

Open Left's Rosenberg: "It's official: Obama is an idiot. [...] It's time to seriously start talking about primarying Obama in 2012. He's now officially the most conservative Democratic President since Grover Cleveland. And the dumbest one since James Buchanan."

MyDD's desmoinesdem: "Please tell me our president is smarter than this. [...] It's as if he wants Democrats to stay home this November."

The Reality-Based Community's Jonathan Zasloff: "I'm trying to think of what could possibly be a worse plan. Let's see: we might be entering a double-dip recession and unemployment is in double-digits, and you are going to freeze spending? What in God's name are they thinking? [...] Why exactly did I give money and make calls for this guy in 2008?"

The New York Times' Krugman: "A spending freeze? That's the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback? It's appalling on every level. It's bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. [...] It's bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead. And it's a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view -- and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008."

Open Left's David Sirota: "This is actually worse -- way worse -- than John McCain's campaign proposal for across-the-board cuts, as across-the-board cuts would have hit the massive and bloated Pentagon budget. Instead, the Obama administration is specifically and exclusively targeting social safety-net spending for a budget freeze (read: cut in real, inflation-adjusted dollars)."

digby: "It's been my biggest complaint about Obama from the beginning. They always do this 'one from column A and one from column B' thinking they can please everyone. But to sound tough on bankers and then enact a spending freeze (on 'non-security' spending, natch) is too clever by half. Combined with the deficit fetishism, it will tie his hands at the time he needs the most flexibility on jobs --- and further destroy liberalism in the process."

Firedoglake's David Dayen: "Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he'll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs. And of course, the truly unbelievable thing about this is how it's framed as non-security discretionary spending, as if spending on the military is magic and somehow doesn't affect budgets."

Meanwhile, there are some on the left who regard the plan as a ploy, but are dismayed even so. And a fair number of GoPoPs (GoPoP = the VERY-Ri8ght Wing of the Party of Property--PoP). Go follow the conversation. I am of the opinion that he does, indeed, intend to try to salvage his waning credibility on the backs of the poor, the disadvantaged, the dispossessed, and the despised.