Reports say the new underground structure at the White House is finished, but no one knows what it’s for. A man-cave where the president can get away and have a cigarette and a burger? Cold storage for the Churchill bust? Tomb for presidents to be buried in with pharaonic glory? That last one might be the closest: It’s possible President Obama, upon hearing of the Chinese emperor buried with a vast army of terracotta warriors, wanted to be likewise entombed. In his case, with the army of straw men that follows him to every campaign performance.

If there are any left, that is. In the first debate the president had his usual cohort from the Hay-American community, only to find Mitt Romney standing at the podium flicking the wheel of a Zippo. Confronted with actual facts coming from an actual person, the army was consumed so quickly not even the president’s flop sweat could extinguish the blaze.

But new armies are being raised by others. A new ad from Priorities USA — you know, the people who gave us the ad suggesting that Romney’s fearsome Retroactive Bain Ray gave a woman cancer — is ripping into Mitt’s education policy.

For example: He might cut Head Start. This is bad for one simple reason: Head Start exists. Anything else — its usefulness, its efficiency, its budget — is irrelevant. In a perfect world, Head Start is expanded to everyone, so all kids begin ahead of all other kids. It’ll work! See, federal dollars have a “Flowers for Algernon” effect — rub them gently over the school district, and IQs rise; withdraw them, and children turn into glassy-eyed dullards slumped over history textbooks whose last chapter is “Spanish Perfidy in Cuba.”

Romney hates college, so he would cut programs that make it possible for middle-class kids to afford a four-year fantasy interval of hash and hook-ups while parroting trendy twaddle to withered agitators barnacled to the hull by tenure. Maybe that’s a good thing. If middle-class kids can’t afford college, something is wrong with college. Educational institutions have realized they can charge thousands of dollars for classes like “Woven among Us: Queer Quilt-Makers in Colonial Nova Scotia,” so they do. No one complains, because studies show that college automatically makes you richer, perhaps because employers think, “If you could stomach that codswallop without geysering latte out your nostrils in laughter, you’ll put up with anything I throw at you.”

Add an alarming report in the New York Times showing how Chinese schools annually turn out thousands of scholars who can recite Nova Scotia quilt statistics. Panic results, and of course the only response to panic is to throw wads of money until the problem is buried under a stack of borrowed greenbacks — which are promptly spent on “world-class schools” that build glassy edifices for the newly created Department of Hating Everything Dad Approved Of.

You wish President Romney would turn his Smiling Hawk of Cruel Truth expression on the callow youth of America and say, “If you want to waste four years honing your intellectual and professional irrelevance, fine. But do it on your own dime, and don’t take out loans, because you’ll be drawing hearts on cappuccino foam for bankers on a coffee break at your Starbucks job when you’re 30, and you won’t be paying back $60K from quarters tossed in the tip jar, no matter how elegantly you wrote the Maya Angelou quote on the coffeehouse chalkboard. You want other people to pitch in, join the Army, and then we’ll talk.”

The ad concludes that Mitt Romney wants to cut education money, then give a $250,000 tax break to millionaires. That makes sense. A man can drive past only so many schools before he realizes that those snotty-nosed sacks of substandard DNA are sucking up money that could be spent on those tiny gold forks you use to dip shrimp in cocktail sauce. It’s one thing that the lower orders breed. It’s another entirely that they learn to count, because then they’ll realize that someone else has more money than they have, and they will figure out a way to take it.

Really, isn’t this why rich white guys go into politics? Not to sunder the spine of a sclerotic system to ensure that poor kids receive better education, or give parents the ability to choose a school instead of being frog-marched into some brick bin where the administrators retire at 55 but the kids’ textbooks explode into a cloud of dust if you drop them, or make local taxpayers confront the brunt of the things they blithely vote to approve.

No, those are lies. We know they are lies because his tax plan is a lie. An economist said “a 14% readjustment in the projected 34% capital-gains-tax income adjusted over ten years, assuming 1.9% growth in seasonally adjusted revenue, will require a 23% tax increase on the middle quintile, if Romney intends to cut spending by 16% above baseline projections adjusted for decreased interest payments. Can I have some ice cream now? I’m a good boy.” Ergo anything Romney says is a filthy lie, and his education proposals are more of the same.

Thanks to the ad, we see the true dark perfidy dragged mewling into the withering light of day: Mitt Romney went into politics to turn the masses into dumb serfs who will be content with a measly stipend as long as they have free phones, cheap beer, schools that graduate illiterates, and no path out of their cramped and dispirited world. That’s so wrong.

Also, we need to spend more on food stamps and welfare. And schools!