On Monday night’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, the show’s “All-Star Panel” addressed the news of President Barack Obama’s budget proposal, which was discussed on the Sunday public affairs programs this week.
White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew made the incorrect assertion that it would require 60 votes, an impossibility without bipartisan agreement, for the U.S. Senate to pass a budget. And although that statement was skewered throughout the day, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer suggested that it was made out of habit to blame Republicans for everything. (RELATED: More on Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget)
“It’s so completely wrong, you have to ask yourself how can Jack Lew, who was as you said the budget director twice under the Clinton administration and now today, have made a mistake like this?” Krauthammer said. “I don’t think he lied. He would have known he would have been called out.”
“This administration is so used to blaming everything on Republicans — earthquakes, hailstorm, who knows, rising of the ocean,” he said. “And even here, Jack felt that he had to blame this on Republicans when in fact the passage of a budget in Senate has nothing to do with the Republicans. It’s all in the hands of the Senate Democrats, who as you say have a majority.”
Host Bret Baier pointed out that the only one of the presidential candidates that had been making an issue of the budget process had been Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul. But Krauthammer declared Paul’s nomination unlikely and suggested that Paul’s competitors follow his lead.
“Unfortunately he’s not going to win the nomination,” Krauthammer said. “But those who could are not doing enough of this or even doing it at all. And they’re not going to win the general election unless they make spending and the debt the issue that it really is what Americans really worry about. They are accepting the president’s premise that somehow all of us have become Occupy Wall Street. Everybody thinks if you redistribute income to solve the economic problem. Let me be more cynical. And everybody thinks that if you redistribute income, you’re going to solve our economic problems.”
The Washington Post columnist then likened Obama’s budget proposal to being worthy of the beleaguered Eurozone nation Greece.
“I’m rarely accused of not being cynical enough, so let me be even more cynical,” he continued. “The president knows that we are headed over a cliff. He just wants to get past Election Day as he does on everything — on Keystone, on debt ceiling limits, on everything. But this is a budget worthy of Greece and for the president of the United States to offer it knowing how dire our situation is, is truly scandalous.”