Krugman: With Friends Like These...

[n2doc]

April 12, 2011, 9:02 AM
With Friends Like These, Who Needs the Enema Man?

The Post says that Obama is going to more or less endorse Bowles-Simpson in his Wednesday talk.

Sigh.

Now, I know that Bowles and Simpson are Serious People, who say things like this:

“This is a fakery,” Simpson said on Fox News. “If they care at all about their children or grandchildren, and sometimes I doubt that – I think, you know, grandchildren now don’t write a thank-you for the Christmas presents, they’re walking on their pants with the cap on backwards listening to the enema man and Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg, and they don’t like them!”
(I think the enema man is Eminem.)

Beyond that, though, Bowles-Simpson was a really bad proposal. Its cost-containment plan for Medicare was nothing but a magic asterisk; it proposed raising the retirement age without giving any consideration to the fact that life expectancy hasn’t risen much among lower-income Americans; it arbitrarily set a cap on revenues as a share of GDP.

And by endorsing an already right-leaning document, Obama will of course define the center as being somewhere between the right and the far right.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/with-friends-like-these-who-needs-the-enema-man/