Mr. Chait is a stone cold liar. [View All]

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He claimed that Robert Reich said the following:

There is a decent argument that the president should have refused this deal. But if you make that argument, you have to accept the likelihood that nearly a million fewer jobs would have been created and that we would have been at risk of a double-dip recession back then. Yet the liberal critics most exercised about Obama’s failure to secure more stimulus were, for the most part, enraged when he did exactly that. Take Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor under President Clinton. Last November, Reich pleaded for an extension of unemployment benefits, calling the plight of the jobless our “single newest and biggest social problem.” When Obama made his bargain, Reich called it “an abomination,” complaining that “the bits and pieces the president got in return” — including the unemployment benefits previously deemed vital — amounted to “peanuts.”

except he left out something pretty damn important

The bits and pieces the President got in return — extended unemployment benefits, a continuation of certain small tax benefits for the middle class — are peanuts. After last week’s awful jobs report, Senate Republicans would have been forced to extend unemployment insurance anyway. what was left out by the lying liar is in bold

Now there is no nice way to describe what Mr. Chait did. He purposely left out a quote in order to dishonestly portray what Mr. Reich said. He wanted Reich to sound like a hypocritical crackpot. Sadly for him the actual words Mr. Reich said didn't make him sound like one so he decided to leave some words out. Now maybe Mr. Reich was wrong when he said that the Senate would have been forced to pass the unemployment extension. That would have been a valid and honest argument. Instead Mr. Chait lied to us because he didn't want and more likely couldn't make that argument.

The simple fact is liberal critics of that deal were right on the three counts that we actually opposed that deal. One problem we had was that the benefits for the rich lasted until past the election of 2012 while those for the middle class and poor only lasted until 2011. That set us up for where we are right now. The House won't extent those benefits without something they really want. The second problem was that by extending the tax cuts we now hear nothing but deficit this and deficit that and deficit the other thing. The entire, not some of, not most of, but the entire deficit crisis would be solved by merely eliminating the bush tax cuts. Thirdly, by not including the debt ceiling in the deal we were left with the horrible hobson's choice that we had in Aug. Mr. Chait didn't want to address any of that, so instead, he lied to our faces.