[melliedee]

David Brooks:

First, there was his tone. Obama cast himself as the fiscal moderate who embraced the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles approach. (Perhaps we were all asleep during the Simpson-Bowles-Obama consciousness tour.) Then he unleashed every 1980s liberal cliché in the book, calling the Republicans a bunch of trickle-down, Trojan horse-bearing social Darwinists.

Social Darwinism, by the way, was a 19th-century philosophy that held, in part, that Aryans and Northern Europeans are racially superior to brown and Mediterranean peoples.

Then Obama exaggerated the differences between his budget and the Ryan budget.

There are, indeed, real differences, but in the short term they are not a chasm. In 2013, according to Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University, the Ryan budget would be about 5 percent smaller than the Obama budget, and it would grow a percent or two more slowly each year. After 10 years, government would be smaller under Ryan, but, as Daniel Mitchell of the Cato Institute complains, it would still take up a larger share of national output than when Bill Clinton left office.

Obama exaggerated these normal-sized differences into a Manichaean chasm. Under Ryan, Obama charged, 10 million college students would get their financial aid cut by $1,000, Alzheimer’s research would be slashed, 200,000 children would lose their chance to enter Head Start.

Where did Obama get these specifics? He imagined them. He imposed some assumptions that are nowhere to be found in the Ryan budget. He compared Ryan’s reduced spending increases with proposed growth, not current levels.

Then the president turned to Ryan’s Medicare proposal. The Ryan plan, he charged, “will ultimately end Medicare as we know it.”

In 2011, when Ryan first proposed a version of this budget, Politifact, the truth-checking outfit, honored this claim with its “Lie of the Year” award. Since then, the Ryan Medicare proposal has become more moderate and much better. Obama’s charge is even more groundless.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/op...&smid=fb-share