What? You got a problem with that, Hobbits?

Amid this month’s payroll tax fracas, few noticed that Congress passed a 1,200-page, $1 trillion omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2012. Maybe no one in Washington boasted because it’s a victory for spending as usual. Republicans—in the House and Senate—need a better strategy.

The news is that after accounting for last-minute unemployment insurance extensions, “emergency” spending and higher Medicare physician payments, total federal outlays are estimated to be $3.65 trillion in fiscal 2012, up slightly from $3.6 trillion in 2011. The last year has seen no major reforms in any of the big entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. Spending on food stamps alone is scheduled to reach $80 billion in 2012, more than double the amount as recently as 2007.

Republicans had promised to roll back discretionary spending to 2008 levels, to save $100 billion. But the August debt deal lowered the savings to $7 billion—or a 2012 target for appropriations of $1.043 trillion. Even that target was missed because appropriators tacked on roughly $10 billion in disaster relief—hurricanes this summer—and so the new total is $1.054 trillion. That’s $4 billion more than the 2011 baseline of $1.050 trillion, although savings from troop withdrawals in Iraq may reduce that.

What about killing programs? Well, only 28 programs out of the thousands of line-items contained in the omnibus budget were terminated. The list includes mostly minor programs such as $12.5 million spent on something called “adolescent family life,” $1.2 million for civic education, and $1.4 million for economics education (not for members of Congress).

The one major domestic program of more than $100 million that got the axe was the Energy Department loan guarantee program for the likes of Solyndra. The total domestic savings from program terminations come to less than $0.5 billion.

Meanwhile, scores of programs that have long been GOP targets survived: Amtrak, the Legal Services Corp., National Public Radio, the United Nations population program, mass transit grants, and even funding for the U.N. Climate Panel. Spending increased for many programs, such as the National Institutes of Health, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Indian Health Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Big government, and big spending, are a fact of life. Natural events, like hurricanes or tornadoes. And you can’t simply legislate away natural events, can you? Why, people would think you extreme!

To even try to curb overspending — or rather, to demand that we elect representatives who will try — is to fight a battle that can’t be won and so shouldn’t, pragmatically-speaking, even be waged. It’s political suicide, after all. And the most important battle is gaining power, even if it means the GOP must align itself more closely with progressives than with conservatives. Lest people talk.

The sooner the unnuanced rubes and the cult of True Believers accept this — and join in the real battle, which is getting our team in a position to do all the spending and decide how the wealth should be distributed (we in the GOP don’t call what our guys do “wealth redistribution”; we call it “compassionate conservatism,” and hope that it works as an obvious enough pander to win us some key swing voters who are going to “vote their economic interests” no matter what) — the better off we’ll all be.

You can’t fight hurricanes. Which you silly extremists would know if you listened to your betters. After all, there’s a reason they’re part of a ruling elite and you aren’t. Just vote for who they tell you to vote for and then they’ll take it from there.

So whaddya say? Why not jump on the team and come on in for the big win. Or maybe you want to find yourself standing tall before the man?

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

(h/t TerryH)