"I feel your pain,"

We're publishing today from a secure bunker in an undisclosed location so as to avoid the fallout from the apocalypse known as the sequester. Today, the $85 billion in federal spending "cuts" take effect now that the Senate failed to pass either Democrat or Republican alternatives yesterday. The devastation is unthinkable -- unable to afford plane trips home to Delaware, Joe Biden will even begin taking the train again. We just pray the nation survives.
All kidding aside, the sequester does, in fact, involve real pain for real people. Barack Obama is ensuring that layoffs, furloughs, pay cuts and the like are as widespread and as painful as possible, all in an effort to defeat his political opponents and extract even greater tax hikes out of them. He even released hundreds of detained illegal aliens, and then blamed his Department of Homeland Security for doing it without his knowledge. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano also blamed underlings. Obama also warned that cuts will affect an agency that no longer exists. And the sequester is a "manufactured crisis" the White House blames for delaying its own budget submission, due Feb. 4.
But just remember who manufactured it to begin with -- Barack Obama. He will continue the charade to ensure that the maximum damage is done from the "Republican Sequester."
As we go to press, the president is meeting with Republican leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, presumably to rhetorically abuse them in private before he does so again in public. To show how serious Obama is at replacing sequestration, or even just better managing it, the White House threatened a veto of a GOP offer to let the president have even more authority to selectively implement the sequester. Senate Democrats were happy to kill the bill for him.
For his own political gain Obama needs the sequester to be a blunt object that causes as much pain as possible. Besides, it's a win-win for him. Now he can tell the affected people, "I feel your pain," all while blaming Republicans. If the GOP caved, spending would have continued to grow out of control, just like he wants. For that matter, it will still grow out of control, just at an imperceptibly slower pace. In reality, the spending "cuts" for FY2013 amount to just $43 billion.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) added to the blame game: "The Republicans want the sequester to go forward," he said. "We cannot solve the problems of this country with cuts, cuts, cuts. We've cut $2.6 trillion. We need to do more but we're going to do it in a balanced approach. We cannot continue to hurt the middle class and the poor." As usual, by "cut" he means reduced growth, and by "hurt the middle class and the poor" he means reduce government redistribution of wealth.
Remember, we're talking about just 2 percent of the federal budget, and 6 percent of deficit spending. All working Americans took a 2 percent pay cut at the beginning of the year thanks to the payroll tax hike, though we weren't supposed to notice it. How can the government not continue to function while undergoing such small spending reductions?
If you remember just one thing about this latest "crisis," remember this: Obama and his NeoCom cadres will blame the "Republican Sequester" for any and all ills between now and the 2014 midterm election. Obama knows that the net effect of his $300 billion payroll and income taxes hikes (which reduced incomes by the most in 20 years), on top of skyrocketing ObamaCare health insurance premiums, mounting debt and deep military cuts already enacted, will send the economy back into recession.

Thus, from sequester forth, every negative economic GDP or jobs report, which in reality demonstrates the continued planned failure of Obama's socialist "recovery stimuli," will be blamed on the "Republican Sequester." Indeed, while GDP growth for the fourth quarter was revised up to an exciting 0.1 percent, and we suppose that's an improvement over the initial estimate of 0.1 percent contraction, you'll have to forgive us if we don't jump for joy.
Obama will employ his classist "politics of disparity" playbook to blame sequester "cuts" for every runny nose in America, claiming the nation can't "afford" even minuscule cuts to socialist welfare programs. And make no mistake -- in partnership with his Leftmedia public relations network, Obama may win the public opinion contest. Of all people, Bob Woodward is the only one standing in the way, which is why his colleagues are now disowning him.
The sequester is absolutely the wrong way to go about cutting spending -- it's indiscriminate (though more so than it actually has to be) and it targets defense disproportionately, all while not even really cutting anything. But given that the Obama White House isn't interested in governing, only moving from crisis to crisis, it ended up being the only option.
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