POST SELF-PARODY WATCH. Dean already flagged this in the wee hours of the morning, but it's worth emphasizing the goofiness of this Ruth Marcus column proposing a "commission made in heaven" -- a Social Security reform group headed up by John McCain and Hillary Clinton. Marcus manages to explicitly avoid the pernicious conflation of Social Security and Medicare finance issues that Dean tracks so often in elite media commentary, and yet still thinks now is the moment to "fix" Social Security, basically just for the hell of it. The number of Beltway press ticks this single column incorporates -- bipartisanship, our "broken" political system, painful entitlement reform, political courage, commissions, Clinton and McCain obsession, the assumption of mass public interest in what is actually an elite policy obsession, did I mention bipartisanship? -- is truly impressive. If that's the right word.
--Sam Rosenfeld
