Who Lied on the Sunday Morning Chat Shows?

Every Sunday, while you brunch and have a life, politicians and other professional chatterers take to the TV shows. There, they reposition the events of the week — and, if you watch closely (or watch at all), you can see them straight up lying about things. This weekend, the best liars were Congressfolks Paul Ryan and John McCain. “McCain agrees that there is dysfunction in government, but he thinks that the Tea Party isn’t responsible for it. He then just straight up lies: ‘The fact is that the president never came forward with a plan. I was gratified to hear that he had plans, but there was never a specific plan. There was always the so called leading from behind….’ There was a plan put forward by the White House, in July, that was in all the newspapers, that included $4 trillion in cuts/$1 trillion in revenues/entitlement reform, and the RNC remembers it well enough to criticize the White House for wanting to make cuts to Medicare (the same thing the RNC wants to do).”

Nice one. Paul Ryan gets in on the act pretty well. “Ryan also lies about what the White House offered in terms of the debt ceiling negotiation — per Ryan, it was ‘blank check’ to ‘big tax increase.’ In actuality, the guy who made the ‘blank check’ proposal was Mitch McConnell, and the White House, most notably, offered four trillion in cuts and included changes to Medicare eligibility. Because it hurt the GOP’s chances of being able to tag the White House as unserious, they rejected it, predicting (correctly, as it turns out) that the media wouldn’t remember the ‘grand bargain’ and its terms.” Democracy!