This is your newly re-elected president.

Show me on the doll where he hurt you, America.

The Obama administration denied an appeal for flexibility in lessening the sequester’s effects, with an email this week appearing to show officials in Washington that because they already had promised the cuts would be devastating, they now have to follow through on that.

In the email sent Monday by Charles Brown, an official with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service office in Raleigh, N.C., Mr. Brown asked “if there was any latitude” in how to spread the sequester cuts across the region to lessen the impacts on fish inspections.

He said he was discouraged by officials in Washington, who gave him this reply: “We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that ‘APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide fundingto cover the costs.’ So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.”

This administration already went Soviet once, when Arizona tried to gain some control over its violent border with Mexico. Now they’re doing the same thing to the rest of us.

There’s something additional at work here too. Two of Obama’s major initiatives, his health care law and his EPA regulatory state, were predicted to be job killers. They have proven to be job killers. But Obama is now hoping to use the cover of sequestration to blame his dismal economic record on Republicans. Whatever lie gets him through the day.