How many lies can you fit into a single NY Times lead sentence?.

Europe’s leaders braced their nations for a turbulent year, with their beleaguered economies facing a threat on two fronts: widening deficits that force more borrowing but increasing austerity measures that put growth further out of reach.

Note the martial language, economies are beleaguered, they are facing a threat. Threats. The problem is that deficits are widening you see. When the Left is in charge, deficits are like a natural disaster or something, there’s really nothing people can do about it. It just is. And that is what causes increased borrowing. It’s like physics or math. It’s certainly not Obama’s anyone’s fault. Well, there was all that defense spending right? If anything that’s it.

Increasing austerity measures. Austerity. It really is the only approved word in discussing these issues. Reminds one of a dried up old maid, or a monocled 1%’er so prim and proper one couldn’t pound a nail up his ass with a sledgehammer, eh? Increasing austerity measures. Now some might say postponing the European Union GLBT Green Summer Playhouse for Social Justice is too drastic of an austerity measure, as opposed to something really dramatic, like keeping overall spending flat or something even more draconian, spending fewer actual Euros next year than this. Pish tosh, can’t be balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. No, these dramatic cuts (which of course are not cuts at all but less more spending) are terribly austere. Terribly austere.

And of course, the punch line, the whole point of the lie sentence, is to say increasing austerity measures that put growth further out of reach. There we go. Growth is out of reach BECAUSE of austerity measures. Not running deficits every year forever, in the past and into the future. Not because the Greeks are lazy tax-cheats that make Chicago public employee union members look like a team of eager beavers. Nope, it is “austerity measures” that is stopping EU growth. We’ve identified the cause of the problem, and of course we all know without even saying which yahoos are always pushing “austerity”.

Shorter Times: The TEA Party is killing the European economy too.