From last night’s All Stars:

On President Obama’s proposed budget:

The president used the word “honest.” That’s astonishing. Look, all budgets are fiction. This one is fantasia.
Look, let’s start with the projections in revenue. Obama has promised to cut the deficit by the end of the first term in half. He does it by pretending that in 2011 there will be a growth in the economy of about 5.5 percent, and in the next year it will be over six.
Now, these are Chinese-level numbers, and even the Chinese aren’t achieving them anymore. It is completely fictional, those numbers.
Next year he says we will grow at about 3.5 percent. Next year we could still be in negative territory.
And then on the cuts, he speaks about the $2 trillion in savings. And, actually, in the speech he gave to congress, he spoke of $2 trillion in savings, and now he has amended it, and he says, well, budget reduction.
And that’s because half of it isn’t savings at all. It’s tax increases. And the other half is a fictional saving of a projected spending on Iraq, which would go out to ten years at the current levels, and have us spending in 2018 at a level that we are today that nobody expects and nobody even imagines.
So it’s a saving of about a trillion and a half of Iraqi spending that would never have happened in the first place. And that’s how he gets his spending cuts….
And on the agricultural cuts, he announced it proudly. It is $20 million, which means that if you have a thousand of those, a thousand of those, it would be 1/10 of one percent of $2 trillion in cuts he has promised.
It is a matter of scale. The cuts he’s talking about are miniscule and almost risible when you look at his promises. The big cuts are actually tax increases fictional Iraq savings.

On the president’s plan to withdraw combat troops from Iraq:

There is a big announcement of the 19 months, but I think, in the end, the president is not going to be foolish if it looks as if he has to slightly slow down. He will.
And the parameter is the end of 2011. That’s going to remain the main parameter.
But what disturbs me is the way the president speaks about Iraq dismissively and grudgingly. He talks about leaving it and ending the war without ever speaking about what we have achieved.
He speaks about the courage and the sacrifice of our soldiers, but he never connects it with the soldiers’ mission, meaning what they have created and done.
He talks about the Iraq the way he did as a candidate who opposed the war. He is now commander and chief, and he is responsible for the troops and the war and its success.
And I think he needs to speak about achievements, establishing a democracy, and having the strategic ally in the region, and not speak about it as if it’s a simple albatross he wants to unload.