Budget Popcorn: Butter or No Butter?

If the GOP was going to follow-up the Budget deal with some real cuts, they'd get right to it, wouldn't they?

Behold:

“This is about making the right decisions now,” Cantor said. He touted Rep. Paul Ryan’s, R-Wis., budget proposal — a plan released last week that contains about $6 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years — and suggested Republicans would fight for at least a chunk of that plan as a condition of their support on the debt limit vote.

Cantor said a portion, and I think a portion is all he and Boehner expect to get. Which is what any sane person would expect when the Democrats control the Senate and the White House. Shutting down Pelosi (notice how absent she's been from these debates?), and hemming in Obama and Reid are about what Boehner can do. And I can tell that it's working, because:

“It’s totally unbalanced,” Van Hollen said. “He ends the Medicare guarantee for seniors. … They’ll have to eat all of the rising costs of health care, while they provide big tax breaks for millionaires and the corporate special interest."

This is what those triumphant donkeys of 2007-2010 are reduced to; muling and fussing about grampa's pills. Their backs are up against the wall, and they've got nothing to do but point to a weak-tea, half-assed version of the Ryan plan that the White House is going to offer.

So don't fret, wingnuts. Boehner and company are fighting the good fight.


UPDATE: The WSJ chimes in:

[T]he Obama-Pelosi Leviathan wasn't built in a day, and it won't be cut down to size in one budget. Especially not in a fiscal year that only has six months left and with Democrats running the Senate and White House. Friday's deal cuts more spending in any single year than we can remember, $78 billion more than President Obama first proposed. Domestic discretionary spending grew by 6% in 2008, 11% in 2009 and 14% in 2010, but this year will fall by 4%. That's no small reversal.

The budget does this while holding the line against defense cuts that Democrats wanted and restoring the school voucher program for Washington, D.C. for thousands of poor children. Tom DeLay—the talk radio hero when he ran the House—never passed a budget close to this good.

Indeed.