President Obama signed the order for sequestration to go into effect on Friday evening, after his This-Is-Happening press conference in which he chided, “We will get through this. This is not going to be an apocalypse, I think, as some people have said. It’s just dumb. And it’s going to hurt.” …Uhm, let’s holdup for a second: “As some people have said”? I would hope you are referring to yourself and all of your officials that you steadily marched out to sound the alarm like so many Chicken Littles. Walkback, much?

(Education Secretary Arne Duncan tried to pull a similar walkback on Friday, by the way, after his exaggerations about the sequester’s side effects on teachers were so inconveniently revealed — we just misinterpreted him, guys:

“What I said is that teachers were getting notices, and in the district we talked about, 110 teachers have gotten notices,” Duncan said Friday after touring the Rolling Elementary School in Takoma Park, Md. “I think there was a misinterpretation that I meant they were being laid off tomorrow.”

But the education secretary still did not indicate whether these notices could be definitively linked to the sequester, or whether they were part of an unrelated warning that affected low-income schools that receive Title I funding.

Really? Because, I’m pretty sure that your original statement last Sunday was, “there are, literally, teachers now who are getting pink slips; who are getting notices they can’t come back this fall,” and that with it you meant to imply that it was on account of the sequester. Literally.)

So let’s have none of this “some people” nonsense, and quit pretending like the president didn’t do everything in his power to make sequestration sound as godawful as possible in your attempt to hike taxes and smite Republicans.

But don’t worry, friends: Perhaps “not everyone will feel the pain of these cuts right away,” but I feel certain we’ll be hearing about every single negative effect that does occur, described in loving detail:

The reductions, which Obama formally ordered late Friday, are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future. …

Over coming weeks, senior administration officials said, he will highlight people and localities hurt by the sequester, with the intention of creating pressure to force Republicans to concede. But the president said that could take months.

Ugh. Let the campaigning begin. …Oh, I’m sorry, did I say begin? I meant continue.