[oldembed src="https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640" width="420" height="245" FlashVars="launch=45970727&width=420&height=245" fid="2"]
On Thursday morning, Jim DeMint went on "Morning Joe" to pimp his new book -- Now or Never: Saving America from Slightly Higher Taxes on Rich People Economic Collapse -- and peddled a bunch of lies. All of which went completely unchallenged by the panel, of course.
It all started with Scarborough serving up a nice, fat softball to DeMint.
SCARBOROUGH: We were just saying earlier in the show one of the big problems over the past ten years has been the fact that you had a Republican president who doubled the national debt, with a Republican Congress for six years. Now you have a Democratic president who is going to double the debt again...what do we do to stop the bleeding?
DEMINT: Well, that's what the book's all about. 2012 could be our last chance to turn this thing around. The only way the Republicans in the House now can stop the bleeding is if they shut the government down.
Great plan!
And notice: there's absolutely no mention of the fact that taxes are currently at historic lows, and were cut under the previous administration before the country launched two wars, created a massive new domestic security agency -- and fell into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
None of that has contributed to the deficit at all. Nope, it's just "spending" that's the problem. Amazing.
And it just got worse.
DEMINT: Now we've got the tension between those who want centralized power, government control of education, health care, transportation, energy -- and Republicans who I think finding their footing around their core principles of we need to devolve power out of Washington, we need to decentralize, because that's what makes America work. [...]
The Democrats are there to beat us. Every policy that they introduce is to centralize power. They are completely incapable of cutting spending because their constiuency is based on dependency on government and those who want more government.
Nice racist dogwhistle at the end there. But how many lies can DeMint cram into two paragraphs?
First, you think someone on the panel would point out to DeMint that government payrolls have dropped by 500,000 jobs under Obama. Isn't that what Teabaggers want? Smaller government?
Also, someone may have pointed out that energy companies and the health care industry are making record profits. Again, kind of an odd thing to happen under a bunch of socialists who want to nationalize everything.
Hey, Brokaw and Meacham. You call yourselves journalists? How can these two let this BS go unchallenged? Awful.
