The latest, from Reuters:

President Barack Obama raised anew the issue of cutting entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security as a way out of damaging budget cuts, a White House official said on Sunday, as both sides in Washington tried to limit a fiscal crisis that may soon hit millions of Americans.

For the rational among us, and apparently we are a dwindling few, it can be hard reading ‘news’ like this. It’s the latest from oppositeland, where “cutting entitlements” is a way to cure what “damaging budget cuts” will do to the economy. But under any economic theory cutting Social Security and Medicare by the same amount as those damaging budget cuts (which disproportionately hit the military (YAY!)) can’t be any less damaging to the economy.

How can they be saying this stuff?!

Along the same lines, in non-oppositeland, the following — “as both sides in Washington tried to limit a fiscal crisis that may soon hit millions of Americans” — translates as

as both sides in Washington try to redirect the fiscal crisis so that it falls on the old and sick and not the military.

And that was just the first sentence … Does the Reuters stenographer, Richard Cowan, understand how abased, how bootlickingly absurd he sounds?

P.S. – The White House official, by the way, was Gene Sperling, whose deconstruction by William Neil is worth reading. Just another nice representative of Democratic Party elite economist thinking. A Naked Capitalism writer comments on Neil’s analysis:

… the thesis presented here, of neo-liberalism systematically de-industrializing/de-capitalizing America, and transforming it into an extractive economy (see fracking, mountaintop removal, Keystone and Trailbreaker pipelines, road and rail projects, etc.) with concomitant Second World-style political structures (elite impunity, secret police) has a lot of appeal for me.

Yup yup yup, that sounds like what I see everyday.