On Laura Ingraham’s radio show on Friday, Washington Post columnist George Will took a few digs at the Obama White House for the way it has handled the so-called sequestration crisis.
According to Will, the process has shown the public just where President Barack Obama and other liberals are on government and how any reduction is “intolerable.”
“I think the sequester argument is extremely useful because it’s very educational for the American public,” Will said. “When the Obama administration increases on average 17 percent the budgets of the domestic agencies that are now facing a 5 percent cut, and they say this is intolerable, they reveal that the basic position of liberalism is this — whatever the size of the government is at any moment, it’s the bare minimum standing between us and chaos and misery, which just strikes the American people as facially preposterous. I mean, if you turned to any American family and said, ‘Could you find 2.3 percent savings?’ They would say, ‘Of course, we can do it by noon.’ So I think that the president at long last has so gone over the top in his rhetoric that he’s even losing the mainstream media here.”
He likened the president and his fellow liberals’ steadfast belief that any cut in government is bad to former Soviet Union leader Leonid Brezhnev’s belief he espoused in a 1968 speech that where socialism exists, it shall not give way to capitalism.
“Never mind entitlements, they don’t want to cut anything,” Will said. “They have a kind of a Brezhnev Doctrine. You remember that Brezhnev said wherever socialism is planted, it shall never retreat from spot? Wherever the government is, it shall never retreat. This is their Brezhnev Doctrine for domestic American politics.”
“Look, if you went to the International House of Pancakes with the president and he’s sitting across from you in the booth and you’re both having fun with your big stack of pancakes,” Will continued. “And you said, ‘Mr. President, will you pass the syrup?’ He’d say, ‘Well, no. I think we ought to have a balanced approached to passing the syrup, therefore you have to pay me in new revenues to get the syrup. This is an absolute verbal tick of his, a reflex, and it’s built-in — it’s hardwired into his system. He did not come to Washington — he did not enter politics to shrink the role of government, period.”
Will went on to add that he thought Obama had devalued presidential rhetoric to the point that no one is listening, especially in the case of the sequester panic. He also said he thought the Republicans were attempting to communicate the proper message, despite it being ignored by the media. But he did say it would be up to that same media to point out any efforts by the Obama administration to make sequestration cuts “unnecessary nuisances.”
During the White House press briefing on Thursday, Obama press secretary Jay Carney had a dire warning if the sequester deadline passed, which was those “severe cuts” would take their toll on middle-class jobs and “slash vital services for children, seniors and our troops and military families.”
Will reacted to that statement read by Ingraham by taking a dig at the former Time magazine scribe and his former ABC “This Week” roundtable colleague.
“I will do many things for my country and my profession,” Will said. “I will not take seriously Mr. Carney.”