Greta Van Susteren cons the rubes!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2013

Refuses to challenge McCarthy: Each and every night, voters get misled on Fox.

The trend is growing on Our Own Channel too. On Thursday night, we were struck by The Challenge That Didn’t Get Posed.

Greta Van Susteren was interviewing Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), a member of the Republican leadership in the House. She asked him about that day’s meeting with Obama at the White House:

VAN SUSTEREN (10/10/13): So there are really two issues on the table. The debt ceiling, that was really sort of the main issue here today, right?

MCCARTHY: Because the 17th is the deadline, right.

VAN SUSTEREN: And the budget has to do with the shutdown.

MCCARTHY: No, no. The shutdown is a continuing resolution.

VAN SUSTEREN: But the continuing resolution is because we don't have a budget.

MCCARTHY: True.

VAN SUSTEREN: That's why we have a C.R.

You get the picture. At this point, McCarthy offered a bit of a boast. And uh-oh! Out of nowhere, Van Susteren offered a bit of a challenge:

MCCARTHY (continuing directly): We finally got the Senate to write a budget—

VAN SUSTEREN: But they said you wouldn't go to conference on the budget that they wrote.

Where did that come from?

Good lord! When McCarthy issued his boast, Van Susteren semi-challenged him on a basic point. It’s true that the Senate wrote a budget this year; McCarthy was acting as if the GOP House had forced the laggards to do it.

But when the Senate wrote that budget, the House refused to go into conference with the Senate, as is normally done, to form a joint budget between the House and the Senate. Because no budget conference was held, no formal budget ever emerged. This failure to hold a joint budget conference led to the ongoing shutdown.

Van Susteren knows this, of course. Almost surely, most Fox viewers do not. They don’t know that the GOP’s refusal to take part in a budget conference kept a budget from being written. And now, right out of the blue, Van Susteren actually raised this point as she spoke with McCarthy!

The analysts glanced at one another. They were puzzled, almost frightened.

Granted, Van Susteren only said that this is what the Democrats say House Republicans did. And note what happened when McCarthy offered a non-response response to Van Susteren’s question:

MCCARTHY (continuing directly): We finally got the Senate to write a budget—

VAN SUSTEREN: But they said you wouldn't go to conference on the budget that they wrote.

MCCARTHY: Everybody points back and forth.

VAN SUSTEREN: Lots of that.

MCCARTHY: So Paul Ryan, our budget chair, will sit down. Patty Murray will put conferees together. Remember, in the Senate, their budget never balances. Ours balances in ten years. They raise a trillion dollars in new taxes. So we're going to have a lot of arguments as we go through there, but we want to move it through. Now, when it comes to the continuing resolution, that's still there, that's what we'll continue to discuss with the president to try to move forward on.

VAN SUSTEREN: From what I understand, the debt ceiling is to keep the debt raised until November 22nd, is that the deal? Is that wrong?

In response to what Van Susteren said, McCarthy simply said that “everybody points back and forth.” Van Susteren agreed, then let her guest go on a long ramble, effectively changing the subject.

Fox viewers never heard a response to that Democratic charge. It simply got airbrushed away.

In such ways, many times each night, Fox viewers are kept from knowing the truth. A real journalist would have returned to her basic question when her guest evaded it in the way McCarthy did.

She would have posed the question again! It might have gone something like this:

MCCARTHY: We finally got the Senate to write a budget—

VAN SUSTEREN: But they said you wouldn't go to conference on the budget that they wrote.

MCCARTHY: Everybody points back and forth.

VAN SUSTEREN REWRITTEN: Lots of that! But what about this particular point? Why didn’t the House GOP agree to a budget conference with the Senate? And isn’t that the reason we ended up with no budget this year?

Fox viewers don’t hear questions like those. In the process, basic information is kept from them.

This process is repeated night after night, often in ways which are much more outrageous. This helps explain the political views and understandings of many Fox viewers.

Needless to say, Joan Walsh has a more pleasing was to explain the views of that crazed minority. When Fox viewers simply look at Obama, thoughts of miscegenation pop right into their heads!