What To Make Of Obama’s Warning That Our Debt Is “Unsustainable”?

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Some behavior is so vile that it is described as beneath contempt (“It’s so contemptible that it doesn’t even rise to the level of contemptibility. Contemptible is too flattering a designation for anything so contemptible”.) How then do you describe comments that provide such a bizarrely, breathtakingly audacious indictment of the speaker’s own policies as to leave critics tongue-tied, incapable of coherent criticism?

I am thinking, of course, of President Obama’s warning yesterday that our long-term debt is “unsustainable”:

May 14 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”

“Beneath criticism” or even “beneath ridicule” are woefully inadequate. Help me out here, because, still breathless and tongue-tied, I haven’t been able to think of a term or phrase to capture the monumental effrontery of Obama’s apparent confidence that we will not associate his own unprecedented, massive spending and borrowing with the dangers of which he warns. It’s as though George III had cautioned of the dangers of taxing the colonies, Alexander Hamilton had warned us of the dangers of a central bank, or Jefferson Davis had avowed that secession is a risky business.

Even those allusions don’t rise to the Obama-provided occasion. Perhaps as close as it’s possible to come, or at least for me to come, to characterizing these comments adequately is to say they call to mind the proverbial child who murders his parents and then pleads for sympathy because he’s an orphan. Obama increasingly appears to be a classic addict — in his case, to an overweening government. As such his comments in New Mexico suggest an articulate alcoholic who stands before his AA group and solemnly announces, “I’ve finally realized that I can no longer afford to continue my excessive drinking binge. I’ve used up all my savings, forced my family and friends into debt, and there’s simply no money left…. I’m going to have to find new sources of funds.”

That new source of funds to support his and the Democrats’ addiction that Obama’s comments telegraph that he will discover? Even more and higher taxes than he’d first anticipated.

UPDATE

James Taranto makes the same point:

When Obama lectures college grads on the virtue of thrift, it reminds us of that old joke about the definition of chutzpah: when a guy murders his parents and then pleads for mercy because he inherited all their debts.