How Can We Help President Obama Today?

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

05 April 12

We can tell him that it's about damn time.

esterday and today, he's finally come out swinging, first at the Supreme Court and, right about now, at zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan and his Dark Ages conception of a social compact. This has occasioned more than a little pearl-clutching and swooning, notably from Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post, who is terribly, terribly upset that the president, as the leader of one of the three political branches of government, might attempt to influence politically one of the other branches of government:

Listening to the arguments and reading the transcript, the justices struck me as a group wrestling with a legitimate, even difficult, constitutional question."For the president to imply that the only explanation for a constitutional conclusion contrary to his own would be out-of-control conservative justices does the court a disservice.

Listening to the arguments and reading the transcript, Mr. Justice Scalia struck me as someone waiting on hold to talk to Rush, and Clarence Thomas struck me as being a mute. Alas, great minds can differ. But the notion that a president, confronted with what he perceives to be an ideological bloc within the Supreme Court, is somehow doing a violence to separation of powers by speaking publicly on that issue - that strikes me as being based in the notion that the American people are made of lace and sand-glass. Presidents have taken public whacks at the court since Marbury v. Madison. Which, by the way, and as long as Marcus brings it up, caused President Thomas Jefferson to go completely and very publicly off the rails."On the stump, Newt Gingrich never shuts up about Jefferson's plans to rein in the federal judiciary and, in fact, promises to do Jefferson one better by abolishing courts he doesn't like. (And, yes, this makes Republicans very big hypocritical 'ho's for rooting for the Supremes to strike down the Affordable Care Act, but I thought I'd take that as a given.) Franklin Roosevelt tried to bring the Supreme Court even closer to the 25-man roster of the average major-league baseball team. I don't recall any great discretion's being exercised by various Republican politicians and presidents as regards, say, Roe v. Wade or Miranda v. Arizona. It appears that Marcus has mistaken for statesmanship the abject surrender of the congressional Democrats in the face of Bush v. Gore, which, as we all know, was "a healthy outcome for public confidence in the court's integrity." Or something.

But it's what he's going to tell the Associated Press editors today about the plans of the zombie-eyed granny-starver - and I presume that Ruth Marcus will not be overly distressed by the president's making a political argument against another politician, but who can say? - that's the kind of thing we should continue to encourage....

This Congressional Republican budget, however, is something different altogether. It's a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plan, it's really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It's nothing but thinly-veiled Social Darwinism. It's antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who's willing to work for it - a place where prosperity doesn't trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. "

Now, as detailed in David Corn's excellent Showdown, the last time the president threw something like this in the zombie-eyed granny-starver's face, the granny-starver got his zombie eyes all sad and pronounced himself disappointed that the president would say something mean and partisan, and that he would intimate that all of Ryan's zombie-eyed granny-starving was merely a way to jack more of the nation's wealth upwards, and not a sincere moral enterprise aimed at removing the immoral burden of debt from future generations of zombie-eyed granny-starvers. Nobody does puppy-dog faux regret like this guy does. I expect we'll have some weepy quotes by the middle of the afternoon.

Now, the second part of what we can do is remind the president that, if he's going to be talking about social Darwinism and zombie-eyed granny-starving, he should chuck the suddenly sacred Simpson-Bowles "plan" into the Potomac and sign on immediately to the blog's basic economic philosophy - Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. There's no point in going populist by half-measures. Unzip the man, to quote Ann Romney.