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Apparently Fox News thinks that the daughter of mister deficits don't matter Dick Cheney who helped to break the bank on our spending for two invasions of countries that were never a threat to us and the Bush tax cuts that they justified as being okay because we had a surplus under Bill Clinton is somehow now qualified to weigh in on our problem with the deficit and this very dangerous game of kabuki theater we're watching now on raising the debt ceiling.

Naturally, Cheney claimed that our current problems with the deficit are all the fault of the Obama administration and John Podesta called her out for what some of the true drivers of that deficit are.

PODESTA: Every, every, independent analysis.

CHENEY: There is no way that you can claim that he has been a responsible fiscal steward of this economy

PODESTA: Says 60 percent of that run up goes to Bush tax cuts-

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: Wait, wait, Liz.

PODESTA: Medicare part D and the two wars.

Jon Perr pointed out here back in June why Cheney is of course full of it with what's driving our deficit -- 10 Inconvenient Truths About the Debt Ceiling. Naturally the Fox News host Chris Wallace didn't happen to have this chart handy from Jon's post to counter Liz Cheney instead of telling Juan Williams to shut up while she was repeating her bullshit right wing talking points.

Full transcript below the fold.

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During a Fox News panel Sunday, conservative contributor Bill Kristol admitted that "corporations have a ton of cash" and the Republican Party's mission to slash corporate tax rates was a mistake.

"I think [Republicans] look back on the Bush years and say the problem was we just didn't do enough," Center for American Progress CEO John Podesta told Fox News' Chris Wallace. "And so [they say] let's cut taxes more for wealthiest Americans. Let's try to cut Medicare now, cut Medicaid, cut health care that people need. They don't really have an investment agenda."

Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel quickly disagreed.

"The second highest corporate tax rate in the world was one of the things that got us in this mess," she said. "Going back to say we need to cut that is not going back to old policies, it's fixing the problem."

But Kristol interrupted, finding himself in the odd position of disagreeing with Strassel.

"Republicans are making a mistake if they focus on big businesses and corporate tax rates," he said. "Corporations have a ton of cash. The corporate tax rate is not killing big business in America."

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The Obama administration isn't backing down in criticism of an Israeli plan to build 1600 new homes in East Jerusalem. Israel announced the plan just as Vice President Biden was visiting the country.

President Obama's chief political condemned the move Sunday. "This was an afront, it was an insult," David Axelrod told NBC's Tom Brokaw.

Fox News' Bill Kristol responded to Axelrod by defending the Israelis. "No one doubts this is part of Israel. This little apartment building is going to be part of Israel. No different from Palestinians building apartment buildings in Ramallah. It's ludicrous the it became a big issue," said Kristol.

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George Will quotes free-trader Milton Friedman to trash the idea of "shovel-ready" projects while continuing his defense of George Bush's economic policies. I'm guessing that George Will has refused to go within fifty feet of Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine since he holds Friedman in such high regard.

And Ed Gillespie, when even Murdoch's Wall Street Journal disagrees with your assertions, you're in trouble. From Jan. 2009--Bush On Jobs: The Worst Track Record On Record.

PODESTA: I want to come back to Eric Cantor, which is no cost, no jobs, no ideas. I mean, it seems to me that the Republican Party on the Hill has become the party of no.

Maybe I'd say that it looks, a little bit from his defense of no regulation that it's become the party of Bush, that we've seen how that movie played out. It ended in the in financial meltdown and the great recession. It seems that...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is Ed Gillespie right that it's no risk?

WILL: What?

STEPHANOPOULOS: This strategy?

WILL: I think there is no risk at this point because I think the American people understand that the greatest job creation machine in the history of the world is a reasonably lightly taxed and lightly regulated economy. But one idea, John, that, happily, we're not hearing. When we began this year with...

PODESTA: George Bush had the lowest job creation since World War II, lightly taxed, lightly regulated...

GILLESPIE: Fifty-two months of uninterrupted job creation, the longest in the history of the United States of America.

PODESTA: ... major recession.

STEPHANOPOULOS: What's the one idea?

WILL: The one idea that we seem to have dropped, happily so -- remember the phrase was "shovel-ready"? We were going to create government jobs.

It put me in mind of a great story Milton Friedman used to tell. He went to Asia in the 1960s and was proudly taken by the government to see a public works project. They were building a canal. He was struck everyone was digging the canal with shovels. Friedman says, why no heavy earth-moving equipment?

They said, oh, this is a jobs program. So Friedman says, why don't you give them spoons instead of shovels? I think we understand, now, the sterility of government trying to create jobs.

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I'd like to know why the producers of This Week thought it was necessary to bring Laura Ingraham on the show to defend Fox News? She had about as much to add to the conversation as Michelle Malkin did not long ago. The rest of the Villagers did a pretty good job of circling the wagons around Fox whether the likes of Ingraham was there or not. Ingraham's hackery became even too much for the rest of them to take when she started comparing the White House's view of Fox to that of "Islamic Jihadists".

STEPHANOPOULOS: Now the president did cancel the subscription, George, but then he kind of blew it off. Is it time now as President Obama faces down FOX News down for a JFK moment?

WILL: I think so. Look, no president in the history of this republic has less reason to complain about his treatment in the press than President Obama. Liberals have academic, they have a mainstream media, they have Hollywood. They’re all for diversity and everything but thought. And out here is this one channel, FOX, and they’re all up in arms because in the words of Ms. Dunn of the White House, it is opinion journalism masquerading as news, which some of us would say describes the “New York Times” and certainly MSNBC.

PODESTA: Well, we have partners in journalism in America for a couple hundred years. But I think FOX takes it a little bit to a different level. I think Bill Shein, the vice president for news at FOX came out and said, “We are the opposition.” You know, that I think, can you imagine David Westin going out and saying something like that? Anybody, really in the mainstream news organization, they’re organizing. And I think it seems to me they were overcome with that feeling of joy you get from telling the truth once in a while. And probably they may actually even regret going as far as they have.

INGRAHAM: Well as the FOX representative on this show, by the way, you’re all going to be banned from any future White House events from having me at this table.

Bill Shein said that and I know him well. He said that, because he believes that of all the networks, FOX was going to hold the administration the most accountable. Last time I checked, I thought that was the role of the press. I think and again, I might not be invited back George, but when Charlie Gibson didn’t know what the ACORN story was all about, that was a collective gasp you heard across the United States. Charlie Gibson is an esteemed journalist, how do you not know a story about a group where President Obama cut his political teeth that had been exposed to the extent that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were ready to pull the rug out from under them in their funding? That’s the kind of the story that the White House doesn’t want to have reported and repeated on other networks. That’s why they don’t like FOX News.

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