Support on Capitol Hill for saving Social Security must be stronger than I thought: Pete Peterson’s flying monkeys are working overtime dropping dungbombs on anyone who opposes gutting the government program that lifted elderly Americans out of the grinding poverty that was their standard fate before 1935.

The Washington Post, which long ago abandoned rules of journalistic objectivity in pushing its agenda for cutting Social Security and Medicare, today covered up the plans by deficit commission’s co-chairs to violate the commission’s charter. The Post reported that the commission expects to delay voting on a plan until December 3. This means that the commission will miss the December 1 deadline for a final report specified in both its by-laws and its charter.

Cutting Social Security benefits, either directly or by raising the retirement age, is deeply unpopular. No Democrat should even entertain the notion, especially given that the trust fund currently solvent for the next two decades, and the public is clearly behind the more progressive alternative to dealing with any future shortfall.

You need to start saving to protect your retirement from the Catfood Commission.

The basic difference between Schakowsky’s plan and Bowles-Simpson is not that it relies more on revenue-raisers than spending cuts – although conservatives will surely highlight this – but who bears the brunt of the pain.

I’ve been saying for months that the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is probably doomed. The co-chairs, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, appear to agree.

So my first real question is, What have these people been doing with $500,000 of the taxpayers’ money for the past nine months?

To understand how ridiculous the “serious” people are in Washington, and how broken our political debate is, let me draw your attention to the three biggest political stories of the day. Together, they make the clear case that all this so-called concern about the “deficit” is simply a justification the powerful use to attack the middle class.

Atrios is right: the idea that someone can be “serious” about the deficit while wanting to extend historically low tax rates is ridiculous. But that’s only true if you think yesterday’s Bowles-Simpson recommendations for deficit reduction had anything to do with deficit reduction. Clearly they don’t.

On this day as we pause to remember our soldiers, airmen, midshipmen and Marines, remember that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson want those men and women to get paid less, spend more for their health care and have their houses and workspaces left to rot.

Everyone must now debate the measures recommended by the inept chairs of the Deficit Reduction (aka “Catfood”) Commission to reduce the federal deficit. The fact this topic is the focus of attention is itself a national tragedy and a sign of the political elite’s unwillingness to heed the public’s concerns and their desire that government focus on the nation’s real priorities.