Do you think maybe the White House is regretting that “we have no flexibility with which to implement these across-the-board cuts” talking point a little bit? (‘Er, no, we didn’t mean that we actually wanted more flexibility, we just meant that as a talking point with which to dissuade sequestration altogether so we could keep charging ahead with hiking taxes.)

Here to explain away why those “dramatic, indiscriminate, and across the board cuts” (of the president’s invention, I might add) are all Republicans’ fault, Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz immediately dodges Mitchell’s question on why the president is meeting with Congressional leaders for the first time, the day after the cuts are supposed to hit:

“The Republicans are insisting, are actually going to allow the sequester to occur, abdicate their responsibility. They are actually suggesting giving our responsibility in Congress to the president, which would mean that nameless, faceless bureaucrats in federal agencies would decide on the spending cuts as opposed to members of Congress like me, who are elected by our constituents to make that decision. They have to see the wizard and grow some courage.”

Okay, so let’s accept your premise that Republicans are “abdicating responsibility” with their proposal to give the president more flexibility with how this approximately 1 to 2 percent budget cut is implemented — that certainly doesn’t disguise the fact that president Obama is avoiding that same responsibility like the plague.

Closing loopholes for big oil and corporate jets? Come on. Those gimmicky, piddling efforts will cover the scope of President Obama’s spending habits for about five seconds. As Krauthammer succinctly put it last night, this isn’t really about any particular concern for our national debt and deficit; it’s about sequester never coming to pass so the White House can keep justifying their quest to force the wealthy into paying their idea of a “fair share” to pay for the expanding state. It’s all the same misleading junk math and class warfare we’ve heard before:

Well, he did it again. He went back to the corporate jet loophole. Well, I did the math on the way over. If you collected for the hundred years, it will not cover a month of Obama spending, the corporate jet loophole. If you collect it for a century it is less than what Obama spends in a month. It’s a joke, it’s a way of making a point. It’s the old class war stuff, it’s meaningless. And it shows when he talks about loopholes all he is interested in is raising taxes so that he can spend.

Obama wants to close loopholes not so he can encourage economic expansion with lower rates of taxation, he wants it so he can spend it on entitlements. He is the entitlement president and what all of this is about is creating enough revenue, increasing American taxation, so that he can have an entitlement state as you have in Europe, which requires the European levels of taxation. He’s not interested in debt, he’s not interested in cutting, he’s not interested in deficits. He wants to spend because he wants expanded state.