Rich, Ramesh, and Shannen are all in agreement with my observations about budget flim-flammery, but there’s a bright side to this. Unlike back in the Reagan years, when few recognized for weeks or months (or ever) that budget cuts were partly accounting gimmicks, this time we’ve got the goods in less than 72 hours, and moreover, this fact made the front page of the Washington Post. Like Ramesh’s observation yesterday that defunding Planned Parenthood was not even an issue when the GOP held both houses of Congress and the White House but now is, our hair-trigger awareness of budget issues means the next innings will be watched much more closely. Not likely we’ll let Congress push off the cost of Medicare into a parallel universe, for example.
I think this is partly a validation of the Feiler Faster Hypothesis, which Mickey Kaus brought to the blogosphere ten years ago: In the Internet age, the relevant news travels faster.