Every morning, Politico’s Mike Allen calls the White House to see if the usual White House Coward or one of his lackeys will feed him some nice tidbit from the daily White House Spin. This one looks like it was approved by the Chief of Cowards:

"Good Thursday morning. EXCLUSIVE – DEBT COMMISSION’S BIG RECOMMENDATION MAY COVER SOCIAL SECURITY: President Obama’s 18-member fiscal-responsibility commission, headed by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, is to report recommendations to Congress by Dec. 1. The administration hears that a group of commission members is relatively optimistic about coming together around a package on Social Security. It’s not clear what terms would work politically – what could get through the Congress. But there’s some optimism that commission members can find a way to do that. It’s less clear what they might do on other dimensions of the long-term deficit problem (14 votes are needed to report a recommendation), although they may find smaller coalitions that are bipartisan for approaches to constrain spending growth.

–ADMINISTRATION MINDMELD: The virtue of action on Social Security is that it demonstrates the ability to begin to affect the long-run deficits. Social Security isn’t the biggest contributor to the problem – that’s still health-care costs. But it could help a little bit, buy time, and strengthens the odds of a political consensus behind other spending cuts or tax increases. Most importantly, it would establish more CREDIBILITY with the MARKETS. The mood of the world at the moment (slightly excessive, from the administration’s point of view) is that if you don’t do anything with spending cuts, it doesn’t get you credibility. "

Well, Mike, we’re just shocked, shocked to learn that the Catfood Commission is planning to screw Social Security beneficiaries and that the White House is all excited that the country will finally face up to the non-crisis and create worse problems for insecure seniors by solving a non-problem with a non-solution designed to conceal another agenda, because, you know, there have been virtually no stories about that.

And how helpful of Mike to note that Social Security "isn’t the biggest contributor to the problem," which in normal English to those paying attention translates to: "It isn’t part of the so called deficit problem at all, so this is part of a massive scam!"

No, the "biggest contributor to the problem" is a President and White House team willing to form a secret commission, led by ignorant clowns and stacked with too many people with anti-democratic biases and little understanding, none of whom have to worry about retirement security, and allow them to recommend the degree of retirement insecurity for already insecure seniors, with no political accountability ever, and then have the White House Coward in Chief front for this anti-democratic process and anti-Democratic agenda and feed a useless, tantalizing tidbit to an unquestioning stenographer who doesn’t understand anything about the "deficit" issues, thus faithfully representing the Beltway media.

And why are we celebrating a calculated leak from a secret commission conducting the public’s business that affects tens of millions of our most vulnerable citizens behind closed doors? Open it up, or shut it down.

Update: via David Dayen and The American Prospect’s Tim Fernholz, who says he heard the same briefing Allen did, thinks Mike Allen missed important context:

The most important omission from Allen’s item is that the official concluded the conversation by noting that social security is not a generous benefit compared to other public pensions around the world, and that cutting benefits, even years in advance, would be difficult to justify. More symbolically, Allen doesn’t mention that the official cited Paul Krugman when talking about Social Security’s contributions to the deficit. Finally, the reason the administration official was interested in credibility before the markets is so the government could borrow more money for temporary fiscal stimulus.

So, did Mike Allen just mangle the whole story? We could avoid this if these briefings were public, the source identified, and those present could report what was actually said.

More update: Brad DeLong suggests it was just a mistake to invite Mike Allen to a meeting with grownups. That may be true, but the more important mistake is to hold off-the-record briefings and muzzle competent people with the rules when there’s no real justification for that. If responsible witnesses/reporters can report what actually happened, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about Mike Allens.