It's not all that often someone in the White House press pool gives Jay Carney a run for his money, which is surprising given the number of idiotic claims he makes on a daily basis. Yesterday, however, Fox News’ Ed Henry took him to task on the lagging recovery.
“I've got to play this exchange between Jay Carney yesterday and Ed Henry from Fox News. Ed Henry asked some serious questions, and you could tell that Jay Carney considers him to be an absolute right wing kook,” Pat said on radio this morning. “He believes that Ed Henry is not just looking for answers – not just one of very few who ever challenged this administration – but he's just a right wing nut that he has to deal with every day.”
“Well, he did come from that extreme right wing organization CNN,” Stu joked of Henry’s previous employer.
HENRY: On that point of education, August 2, 2011, the President signed his Budget Control Act of 2011, the last time we had this big debt ceiling fight into law and he says, we've got $2 trillion in deficit reduction, the President says. Quote, ‘Yet it also allows us to make the key investments in things like education and research that lead to new jobs and assures we're not cutting too abruptly while the economy is still fragile.’ August 2011. Here we are more than two years later. You're saying the same thing about ‘we need to invest in education.’
CARNEY: And how many jobs has the economy created since then.
HENRY: 6.5 million. And Bernanke yesterday said it is not keeping up, that people are leaving the workforce.
CARNEY: You and I, we're going to do this on Crossfire one day, I promise. And let's be clear that I'll be on one side and you'll be on the other. Do we need to continue to invest in education? We need to continue to invest in areas of –
“So that's their answer. We're saying the same thing over and over and over again because it's still true,” Pat said. “Well, why is it still true when these policies you keep repeating were supposed to fix the problem in the first place and were supposed to be rolling by now?”
“It's unreal. Again, maybe it's not said enough. This is the slowest recovery in measured history in this country. There has never been an economic recovery like this that has taken this long and has gone this slowly – never,” Stu explained. “You can look at it any way you want to. There's never been any evidence of anything going this poorly when we're talking about a recovery and the reason why they're always talking about a recovery is because it's taking so long. Usually at this point we've already done the recovery and we're on to the next recession. These guys are still in the last recovery. He's been President for a long time.”
One of the things this Administration has prided itself on, as of late, is the not-entirely-true notion that they have somehow cut the deficit faster rate than any other time in the last 60 years.
“Now, that is an unbelievable statistic if you don't know anything about the economy,” Pat said. “It is because, first of all, it's not true at face value. First of all, it isn't true because we reduced the deficit at a faster rate from 2004 to 2007 than we are right now, under Bush. The other thing is, here's what they're basing it on: as a percentage of GDP.”
“And what they're not including in this awful analysis is they have all the records. So they're talking about decreasing the debt from their own records,” Stu added. “[This Administration has] the worst year of all time. They have the second worst year of all time. They have the third worst year of all time. They have the fourth worst year of all time. And they are bragging about their own projections about being the fifth worst year of all time. They are acting as if that's a positive. And the media swallows it.”
“They're just acting as if, well, at the beginning it was really bad but we've improved off of that. Again, it's never taken any administration ever, in measured history, this long to deal with an issue, ever. I mean, just that in and of itself shows how incompetent you are,” he continued. “They're awful, but, still, when you're bragging about what would be if their projections are correct – and they're usually wrong – but if their projections were even correct, [it is] the fifth worst year in American history. He's been President for five years. He has all five of them! All of them are his!”
“And we're supposed to swallow that he's doing great on the economy,” Pat concluded. “It's just awesome.”
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