In December, Charles Krauthammer wrote:

With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president — who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in — to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Today, the lead story on the New York Times website reads:

By redirecting enormous streams of deficit spending toward programs like health care, education and energy, and paying for some of it through taxes on the rich, pollution surcharges, and cuts in such inviolable programs as farm subsidies, the $3.55 trillion spending plan Mr. Obama is undertaking signals a radical change of course that Congress has yet to endorse.

When a Times article (more-or-less calling the president a radical) reads like it’s been pulled from a Krauthammer op-ed, it’s safe to say some cataclysmic singularity has rocked the space-time continuum. And, indeed, that is the case. Barack Obama’s new budget blueprint is the spread-the-wealth turning point we’d been wondering about. And it comes with the kind of creepy parental government-knows-best sensibility that Obama’s most concerned critics couldn’t have imagined:

“There are times when you can afford to redecorate your house,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday morning as he released an outline of the budget for the next fiscal year, which begins in October, “and there are times when you have to focus on rebuilding its foundation.”

[..]

“Having inherited a trillion-dollar deficit that will take a long time for us to close, we need to focus on what we need to move the economy forward, not on what’s nice to have,” Mr. Obama said.

The metaphoric emphasis on utility over aesthetics is chilling and practically Bolshevist.  Americans are about to embark on the most intimate and invasive relationship with the state we’ve ever known.

Krauthammer has proved prophetic in more ways than one. In that December piece, he wrote:

Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about — his domestic agenda.

The Times reports:

Internal debate over which programs to cut is still so intense that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has taken the unusual step of requiring even the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sign agreements not to leak the details. But some clues have emerged, and military consultants say it seems clear that expensive missile defense systems and parts of the Army’s vast modernization effort will be cut back. Some also say that plans for a new Navy destroyer are likely to be scrapped.

Robin Hood doesn’t do defense; he does redistribution. All debate about Barack Obama’s political leanings has now been mooted.