This, from Ezra Klein, is either seriously disingenuous or gobsmackingly ignorant:

Fourth, some conservatives are arguing that Democrats “gamed” the CBO in order to get the score they wanted. That’s only true insofar as you think going to office hours and working with the teacher is the same as cheating on a test. Both parties go back-and-forth with CBO to try and get their legislation down to a price tag they’re comfortable with. But it’s not some sort of trick. In this case, Democrats changed their legislation so the subsidies grew more slowly over time and the excise tax would grow faster. In other words, CBO said that they’d need to do hard things their constituents wouldn’t like if they wanted to cut the deficit more, and they did them. That’s not gaming, it’s governing.

Klein must have been paying closer attention than this, right? The fact that the Democrats reverse-engineered their signatue domestic policy initiative to get the right CBO score is indeed a source of conservative complaints about “gaming” the CBO. But it’s also an exceedingly minor complaint in a sea of major ones — like the Medicare double-counting (which Klein himself called “out of line”); the front-loaded taxes and back-loaded benefits that push most of the cost out of the ten-year budget window; the misappropriation of “revenue” from Social Security and long-term care premiums; borrowed (and dubious) “savings” from the student loan takeover bill, on and on. Is all that governing, too?

For Klein to settle on one little murmur among all these shouts is quite the feat of selective hearing.