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If Obama goes in 2012, the one person I have to admit I'm going to miss running around Washington is little Timmy Geithner.  He reminds me so much of a ticked off little elf at Christmastime who's mad because Santa's asked him to do a bunch of stuff he has no clue how to do.  Which is pretty accurate when you consider that this man has no clue how to budget or maintain the finances of our country.

And before you think that's a partisan swipe I'm taking at a diligent public servant, you have to see the most recent comments Geithner made about Obama's insulting deficit proposal (I know it was technically a budget proposal, but to Obama, a budget is synonymous with a deficit).  Here's the very first line of the news report:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner hailed what he called a "remarkably fiscally responsible" budget that will add almost $4 trillion to the national debt over the next four years.

You can just stop right there.  Just stop and think about that.  And look, I know that there are Republicans who might say similar things.  I'm not absolving any party of blame in this mess.  But let's just acknowledge something together as Americans - that this is unsustainable and unacceptable.  We have to stop giving our political leaders a pass when they declare a $4 trillion addition to the debt "remarkably fiscally responsible" just because they are from our party.

If this is the George W. Bush model, it should be rejected.  If it's the Mitt Romney model, it should be rejected.  And if it's the Barack Obama model, it should be rejected.  Is there anyone who honestly disagrees with me on that point?  Really?  Is there anyone so far gone down the path of partisan loyalty that they won't acknowledge how outrageous it is to consider a $4 trillion debt addition - given the mess that we're in right now - "remarkably fiscally responsible?"

I'm astounded by that.  And I'm astounded that anyone else would suggest that they're aren't appalled by it.  And consider how worse it gets when you actually dive into the proposed budget:

According to the budget released by the administration last Thursday, the federal deficit will total more than $1 trillion in 2009 and 2010, before dropping to $912 billion in 2011, and then reaching a plateau at approximately $500 billion from 2012 until 2019.

Okay, now let's remember, best case scenario for Obama, he is in office until 2016.  So what these presidents do is that they backload their budget proposals with a bunch of draconian cuts that would never be enacted by a future Congress (and they know it).  They run these massive deficits during their years in office, but then include budget proposals that would supposedly happen under a later presidency that involve huge budget cuts.  That allows them to "balance" what their total budget proposal looks like.  In other words, to use an extreme example to explain what I'm saying, Obama can run a $2 trillion deficit for the next five years ($10 trillion in new debt), but then propose that in his first three years out of office the government will be $5 trillion in the black.  That would mean if we followed Obama's budget, he can tout that he is turning our deficit into a $5 trillion surplus.  Absurd.

Yet these are the gimmicks that we have accepted from both parties.  These are the gimmicks that are imperiling your children and mine.  And we are responsible if we don't have the courage to stand up and face off against our own party members when they do this and say, "you're done."  Liberals, that's you right now.  Do you have the patriotism to do it?  We'll find out soon.