Here’s something you can usually count on: the Washington Post editorial board is rarely on the side of human beings. They just love that political process!

If President Barack Obama’s budget offer is primarily an attempt to win over members of the Centrist Hack Pundit Community, and perhaps get them to train their fire on congressional Republican instransigence instead of constantly indulging in leadership surrealism, here’s some good news: The Washington Post editorial board is on board. Sure, chained CPI does not nearly go far enough in depriving Social Security recipients of the money that helps stave off destitution, but it’s a rollicking good start, apparently:

Though far from perfect, the budget President Obama released Wednesday represents the best hope for replacing sequestration with a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal before the federal government hits its statutory borrowing limit in late summer — and before Congress gets paralyzed by the politics of the 2014 elections.

The editors, naturally, refer to the chained CPI cuts, as well as reductions to Medicare, as the “most important” parts of the deal. (More important even than sparing the country from “excessive domestic-spending cuts falling most heavily on those Americans least able to afford them.” They are a little put out, however, that even as Obama offers these cuts to earned benefit programs, he doesn’t seem to actually wantit bad enough, in his heart of hearts: “Mr. Obama too often casts entitlement reform as a concession to extract Republican assent to higher taxes, rather than a worthy end in itself.”

You know what I say: Obama has been trying to give the GOP these cuts for so long that you might as well accept the fact that they are, at bottom, something he is not at all reluctant to do. That said, if it’s sometimes difficult to cast things like chained CPI as a worthy end in itself, well … that’s because it’s not a worthy end in itself.