President Obama told Virginians that he doesn’t want Congress to give him the authority to implement the sequestration cuts as he sees fit, just minutes after denounced the law for requiring across-the-board cuts.

“Now, lately, some people have been saying, well, maybe we’ll just give the President some flexibility,” Obama said today during his rally in Newport News. “He could make the cuts the way he wants and that way it won’t be as damaging.  The problem is when you’re cutting $85 billion in seven months, which represents over a 10-percent cut in the defense budget in seven months, there’s no smart way to do that.  There’s no smart way to do that.  You don’t want to have to choose between, let’s see, do I close funding for the disabled kid, or the poor kid?  Do I close this Navy shipyard or some other one?  When you’re doing things in a way that’s not smart, you can’t gloss over the pain and the impact it’s going to have on the economy.”

The Washington Examiner reported last week that congressional Republicans were debating the idea internally. “Those conversations are happening and they’re happening at a leadership level,” a Senate source explained. “The bill would not try to replace the cuts, [but] it would instead give the president maximum authority to prioritize.”

Obama’s rejection of the idea came just after he complained about the arbitrariness of sequestration. “Instead of cutting out the government spending we don’t need — wasteful programs that don’t work, special interest tax loopholes and tax breaks — what the sequester does is it uses a meat cleaver approach to gut critical investments in things like education and national security and lifesaving medical research,” he said.

What’s more remarkable, that Obama thinks a tax increase counts as a spending cut, or that he admits openly that he doesn’t want to make difficult choices about how to cut spending?

“He is a world-class bulls*** artist,” a Senate aide said in response to Obama’s speech today.