President Obama took a break from the scandals swirling around his Administration on Wednesday by jetting off to Chicago, where the sort of politics practiced by Obama’s IRS are standard procedure.  There he held a few fundraisers, including a posh reception with fat-cat donors where tickets ran from $10,000 to over $32,000 apiece.

“We’ve got a politics that’s stuck right now,” this great Man of the People declared.  “And the reason it’s stuck is because people spend more time thinking about the next election than they do thinking about the next generation.”

The irony of this bitterly divisive, politics-obsessed President making such a pronouncement at an event dedicated to raking in cash for the 2014 midterms, in which he won’t even be a candidate, was doubtless lost on both Obama and his adoring audience.  They’d all better hope to God that Obama supporters don’t start thinking about the mountain of debt they’re dropping on the next generation, or his entire Party is finished.  Obamanomics is all about selling the future down the river in exchange for enough Big Government swag to buy the next election.

Obama did briefly address the malfunctions currently afflicting his beautiful Big Government machine.  “Do not buy into this notion somehow that, oh, these problems are too big, or Washington is broken,” he advised.  “Washington is not broken.  It’s broken right now for a particular reason, but it’s not permanently broken.  It can be fixed.”

Keep in mind this is the same man who was instructing college kids to ignore voices that warn of tyranny… right before the IRS scandal broke.

We hear this sort of thing constantly from Big Government acolytes, including some Republicans.  The system itself is beautiful, perfect, and eternal.  The only real problem with our centralized government is that it’s not big enough yet.  All problems are temporary setbacks that can be ironed out with few thousand more pages of steaming-hot regulation.  There’s never anything fundamentally wrong with the System.  No aspect of it needs to be dismantled or repealed.  There is only a constant process of refinement and improvement.  Every now and then, the engine of the State chokes a bit, and someone has to go on paid administrative leave.

We got the same song and dance in a hilariously sugary mash note from Daniel Klaidman at the Daily Beast to embattled Attorney General Eric Holder, a sweet and innocent man who didn’t realize the gravity of his Fox News spying scandal until he saw it on the front page of the Washington Post, while sitting at his kitchen table.  Then he was consumed by remorse, but overcame it and sprang into action, “recalibrating balances” all over the place.  No one could be better equipped to lead the Obama Justice Department into a glorious new future of not spying on pesky reporters than the “more experienced, and perhaps a little wiser” Eric Holder.

Naturally, Obama and his supporters claim there’s nothing wrong with ObamaCare that can’t be fixed by making it even more complicated, expensive, and unfair.  Why repeal it, even though none of it works as advertised, and none of its cost projections have come anywhere near reality?  It’s just the latest element of the Big Government system to require eternal tinkering – one more sputtering, squealing engine that will require perpetual tuning.

This attitude is hardly new to the Obama Administration.  One of the hardy perennials of American politics is the promise to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse.  Every budget proposal includes big projected savings from all the waste our constant political gardeners plan to weed out of giant government programs.  But it never goes away.   Just this week, a state audit in Massachusetts discovered that some $18 million in public assistance benefits had paid out to dubious recipients, eleven hundred of whom were dead.  Some of them started collecting benefits after they died.  30,000 food stamp cards were distributed without proper documentation.  In many cases, the full balance of food benefits were withdrawn all at once, which suggests the walking dead remain as ravenous as ever.

And yet, the fantasy of big, accountable, honest, efficient government remains as durable as ever.  No amount of beneficiary fraud, government abuse, or blatant corruption can ever convince the faithful that their god has failed.  The System is not broken – it just needs the right hands on its many levers and wheels.  And yet, the very same politicians who offer those assurances, like Barack Obama, also claim they haven’t got a clue what The System is doing, when it’s time to parcel out blame for the latest disaster.

“Part of being President is, there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,” Obama shill David Axelrod said two long weeks ago, in the course of explaining why the Great Man shouldn’t be held accountable for all those scandals.  You know, the same guy who just told his million-dollar fundraiser audience they shouldn’t “buy into this notion somehow that, oh, these problems are too big, or Washington is broken.”