Social Security assault: It's ideology, not demography and not economics

Shrillblog: WaPo Goes WaCkoFrom the WaPo:

... In short, Social Security is not facing a financial crisis at all. It is facing a need for some distinctly sub-cataclysmic adjustments over the next few decades that would increase its revenue and diminish its benefits.

Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it has ever known. For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president, and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935.

It's the same story with the funding of education in Minnesota. Pawlenty's attack is not about economics, or even about outcomes, it's about ideology. It's all about the foundations of the Republican/Libertarian agenda:

1. Eliminate progressivity in taxation and services.
2. Let the wolves take the weak.

We can have good and important discussions about both of these principals. We can't, however, start those discussion until American journalists find their way out of the deep, dark, black hole they're wandering in. Without journalists cutting through the fog of clever nonsense, Pawlenty and Bush, each in their sphere, will win their covert war.

I don't mind losing a war of ideology that's openly fought. If those two principals are the new core of our society, I can handle that (mostly by looking for refuge and moving!). It really annoys me to never have a chance to fight at all.