You just gotta love Fox allowing the Budget Director for the administration that blew a mile wide hole in our debt and deficit to come on the air and fearmonger about how we're going to "become Greece" if we don't do something to get our spending under control, and talk about making "tough choices" to fix the mess he and his boss George W. Bush helped to create. But that's exactly what the viewers were treated to on this Tuesday evening's On the Record With Greta Van Susteren.
Portman was allowed to tell the lie that the Congress supposedly voted on President Obama's budget. They didn't as Media Matters explains here. He was also allowed the lie and claim that our current deficit is President Obama's fault, when, as we've explained here repeatedly and more times than I can keep track of, the deficit got as big as it did in recent years primarily due to George W. Bush's policies as this article explains.
He was also on there pushing for their latest proposal to kick the can down the road on the debt ceiling for a few months, and to withhold Congressional pay if the Senate doesn't pass a budget, which as TPM and others have noted, may not be Constitutional.
Par for the course for Fox, none of their viewers were made aware of Portman's background, the lies about Congress voting on the President's budget, or the real questions about whether their latest gimmick is even Constitutional. Instead, we were treated to more nonsense about how President Obama isn't "leading" unless he decides to gut our social safety nets and balances the budget on the backs of the working class, the elderly and the poor -- because God knows we can't do anything foolish like raising taxes or getting rid of any tax loopholes for those wealthy "job creators."
If there's anything you can count on over at Fox, it's someone being rewarded for governing badly and for them to make sure that their viewers have absolutely no reminder about anything that's happened in our recent history and that the Bush presidency is washed from their memories.
