Uh, Mr. Obama... about those two guys...

... you picked to straighten out government spending (read: slashing Social Security and Medicare), you know--Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

You've got new polls out that suggest:

Sixty percent (60%) of voters think that neither Republican political leaders nor Democratic political leaders have a good understanding of what is needed today. Thirty-five percent (35%) say Republicans and Democrats are so much alike that an entirely new political party is needed to represent the American people.

Nearly half of all voters believe that people randomly selected from the phone book could do as good a job as the current Congress.

Recent BLS data show that lower-income, less-educated workers are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the unemployed (those with less than a high-school education are 51% of the unemployed/underemployed), and this same poll says these are exactly the same people who feel least-represented by government today.

And, here you are, appointing two fiscal jerks who want to create more poor people....

One would think that you and the Dems would be doing your best to clean up your act--to marginalize the DLC/New Democrat types that think emulating Republicans is a good thing. When you get this kind of polling--that says people think there's no discernible difference between the Repugs and Dems--it's about time the Dems woke up and smelled the coffee. Ladies and germs, you've got a problem, and that problem isn't that your Wall Street bankster contributors are fickle friends.

Bowles and Simpson say that you say "everything is on the table."

That's a lie, and you know it. No one will say one substantive word about the twenty-nine-ton gorilla in the living room--horribly inflated military/national security and war costs. Those are just the costs of doing big business (except that big business isn't paying their share of those costs--we are).

If they--and you--simply refuse to acknowledge the obvious, the only conclusion one can draw is that they--and you--are willfully stupid.

We are paying combined national security and war costs of approximately a trillion dollars a year and that's the huge, dominant share of discretionary spending, and the prime reason for deficits, and those costs have been inflated by a conscious program of privatizing and outsourcing national security tasks and by weapons programs that are, too often, make-work for military contractors and/or are wish-fulfillments for every wet dreamer in the Pentagon. We are, quite simply, breaking the budget to further enrich the corporate world.

So, what do you do? You appoint people who want to privatize Social Security and gut Medicare. How do I know that? Because that's the first thing they wanted to talk about upon appointment. They weren't talking about slashing military spending and ending idiotic, illegal wars.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.


[And, on edit, I'll bet these two bozos are not about to say anything about bringing the top marginal rates back into line with the pre-Reagan days, or, heaven forfend, the 94% rate during the last declared war. These accumulating deficits have occurred because we spend, militarily, as if we are at war (and then add war costs on top of that), and yet, we do our absolute best not to tax the rich, who benefit from war, to pay for those wars. That's just plain dumb.]