Saturday Steyn, on the Malignant Narcissist in Chief and his merry, thieving Emirs of Kleptocristan:

The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001–2008, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP average 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”

Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accomodationists and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense. That leaves Director Elmendorf’s alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah: “Some collapse down the road.”

Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when theeconomic downturn began, the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.

Happy days are here again!

Obama lecturing anybody on fiscal responsibility is like Traci Lords — bless her little heart — opining on the evils of promiscuity. Useful, maybe, if approached as a cautionary tale of the horror lurking in the belly of the beast, from someone who has learned from bitter experience and turned aside to take another path. But for King Dipshit, there is no horror in his stunning economic profligacy, and his approach is (as usual) a smarmy, disingenuous, self-serving political one; by his low-wattage left-wing lights, things are going swimmingly, and proceeding exactly according to plan. Anybody who thinks the craptastic creep actually wants to keep capitalism shipshape and humming efficiently along, rather than “stimulating” it into a spectacular crash and burn from whose ashes the Almighty State can rise like a screeching carrion-bird, is kidding themselves.