Andy, speaking of gentlemen, you are class act.

A wise one too. There was obviously reason for more skepticism than I certainly demonstrated over the weekend — though, even on reflection, I remain grateful there was not a shutdown last weekend. Not behalf of the no-doors Lincoln Memorial. But because the White House was poised to let the military fall hostage to its obstinance.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal calls some of the cuts we saw last night “hokum.”

One senior conservative House Republican aide told me last night:

There is nothing in the CR that is going to change the quality of life for future generations. This is the biggest spending cut in history, but whether you call it $8 billion or $108 billion, it does not move the needle. Such is the size of the mess we are in. Only entitlement reform moves the needle. And when conservatives stop thinking small, and knifing each other over amounts that don’t matter, we can move on to amounts that do.

Leadership aides seem uniformly anxious to get onto the next fight. Not as an excuse or bury mistakes, but because they think they have more to gain/do for the country in the next, bigger fights.

I think there is something to that.

I think Rich was absolutely right the other day: “it’s always worth remembering that the fundamental problem here really isn’t a lack of guts so much as a lack of the Senate and the White House. Get both of those things in 2012, and we’ll be talking trillions rather than billions in cuts and Planned Parenthood will not get another thin dime of federal money.”

There was a lot to be disappointed about Friday – more than we realized over the weekend. But it’s not like the House was dealing with reasonable negotiators.

The Wall Street Journal concludes about the deal, “hokum” and all:

None of this is enough to defeat the budget at this point, but it is infuriating given the GOP leadership’s flogging of that $38 billion top-line figure. On Sunday we heard the leadership might lose 30 backbenchers on the budget vote, but yesterday we were hearing it may be closer to 50 or 60. This will only heighten skepticism over the next budget showdown, and Mr. Boehner will have to drive a harder bargain. Above all, the hokum belies the House GOP’s promise to usher in a new era of lawmaking candor and transparency.