Obama is doing everything to distract from his dismal economy including using the new propaganda organs with the Orwellian “factchecker” labels to toss chaff into the discourse.

Such is their attempt at trying to saddle Paul Ryan with the defeat of Simpson-Bowles

How dare the upstart Republican blister Mr. Obama when Mr. Ryan himself refused to endorse the final product! Mr. Ryan even had the impudence to say that Mr. Obama “did exactly nothing” as a result of Simpson-Bowles or Mr. Ryan’s own budget proposals or any others, “nothing except to dodge and demagogue the issue.”

Media elites are now using this to absolve Mr. Obama and suggest that Simpson-Bowles would have succeeded if not for the all-powerful House Budget Chairman. This rewrites history, so allow us to remind readers what really happened to the Obama deficit commission. […]

The political myth is that Mr. Ryan was the spoiler because he’s an anti-tax purist. His real objection at the time was that the Simpson-Bowles Democrats refused to offer an equal trade on spending. Their non-negotiable demand was that ObamaCare was off the table and there could be no structural reforms in Medicare and Medicaid.

How is that a real compromise? Everyone agrees that Medicare and Medicaid are growing too fast for revenues to keep up. Mr. Obama himself told the 2010 House GOP retreat that “The major driver of our long-term liabilities, everybody here knows, is Medicare and Medicaid and our health-care spending. Nothing comes close.” The fiscal reality is that if health care is off the table, then the only possible not-so-grand bargain is permanent tax increases that chase an explosion of federal spending. […]

So in fact Democrats quashed the necessary supermajority even after they first vetoed any serious reform of Medicare. And Mr. Ryan is the “rigid” one? The beads-for-Manhattan logic seems to be that Mr. Ryan should still have gone along with this entitlement status quo and also tacitly endorse the Affordable Care Act to show he’s a statesman. So he should have done Democrats a favor, become politically irrelevant and not solved the real fiscal problem in return for some nice mentions from NPR commentators. Thanks for the career counsel.

By the way, the same pattern played out on the 2011 “super committee” that followed the debt-limit deal. Texas conservative Jeb Hensarling was willing to trade Medicare premium support for as much as half-trillion dollars in higher taxes. Democrats rebuffed this offer too. […]

The real reason the deficit is still so high is that Mr. Obama lacks Mr. Ryan’s good-faith flexibility. It’s hard to remember now, but Washington was optimistic about Simpson-Bowles early in 2011 as a blueprint for compromise. A White House aide even called Mr. Ryan to invite him to a Presidential speech at George Washington University in 2011, telling him he’d like what Mr. Obama had to say.

With Mr. Ryan in the front row, Mr. Obama instead trashed Mr. Ryan’s House budget, claiming it would pit “children with autism or Down’s syndrome” against “every millionaire and billionaire in our society,” and that was one of the more restrained passages. Mr. Ryan’s Tampa reference to Mr. Obama’s dodging and demagoguery is accurate.

President Petulant has pulled that stunt more than once and never paid a political price for it.

Maybe he finally can this November.

obama paul ryan simpson-bowles