"Without action," the President said, "the accumulated weight ... of ever-increasing debt, will hobble our economy, it will cloud our future, and it will saddle every child in America with an intolerable burden." Incredibly, the President made these statements with a straight face, as though fully expecting his audience to believe that it is he alone who is standing against the bad habits of extravagant spending in Washington.

Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal was one of the few in the press who noted the patent absurdity of the Debt Commission announcement, observing that on that very same day "President Obama called for another $50 billion to $100 billion stimulus plan (and concomitant increase in the deficit)."

"It says a lot about Washington that almost no one got the irony of those paired announcements," Moore remarked. The reality, of course, is that plenty of folks in Washington — in the political realm as well as in the media — "got" what Moore refers to as "irony" (but which is really blatant mendacity and deception). The truth is that President Obama, like many previous occupants of the White House, as well as most of his former colleagues in the Congress — both Democrat and Republican — knows that it's become an obligatory ritual for politicians to declaim and denounce budget deficits, and to profess concern about indenturing our children's children with ever greater debt burdens, while continuing merrily on their spendthrift ways piling more debt on top of debt. In the Washington Wonderland they inhabit, words do not have any relationship to actions. This is so because the Washington press corps and their national counterparts aid and abet this deception, both by failing to point out the incongruity between the politicians' words and actions, as well by actively promoting the ever-proliferating government programs that are being financed by ever-larger deficits.