Obama’s latest ploy is to dress his imperial majesty in budget-cutter clothing, demanding sacrifice around the Cabinet table. One Hundred Million Dollars! Sure sounds like a lot of money. But even [1] the AP isn’t fooled, having borrowed a calculator with scientific notation from the geeky guy in IT and concluded that 100 million dollars per annum to the federal government is like a large latte and a scone to a middle class family. Per year, that is. My colleague Rand Simberg calls it “[2] 100 MicroBaracks” which does not quite roll off the tongue like [3] Brian Riedl’s acute observation that $100M is the amount the federal government spends every 13 minutes.

None of which means anything to Obama’s target audience, which is the vast shallow sea of government-educated folks who are fuzzy on the difference between a million and a trillion, who don’t order scones, who couldn’t quite explain the difference between $6 a day and $6 a year, or for that matter, the difference between 13 minutes a day and 13 minutes a year.

The ideal target audience, in other words, for the desperate ploy by some conservatives to downbrand the Democratic Party as the Democratic Fascist Party. Jonah Goldberg wrote the illuminating text “[4] Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change“, which drew jeers and cheers from the usual suspects but which went largely unnoticed by [5] Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere. Now [6] Jim Lindgren reports that the liberal=fascist meme is starting to break out into the general conversation, to the extent that [7] liberal commentators are girding their defenses.

What does it all mean? It means that the political class believes that a non-negligible percentage of the voting population is composed of idiots. To some non-negligible extent, [8] they may be right.