If anyone was wondering how the pundits over at Faux "news" were going to carry some water for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's ridiculous talking points on income inequality, here you go. From this Thursday's edition of The Five, co-host Andrea Tantaros played a portion of his speech at the Economic Club of Chicago and then opened up the segment with this:
TANTAROS: "Mediocrity or greatness." Dana, the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger wrote today that the left will never support the solutions to income inequality. So, if the problem is we have people who are poor and we need to lift them up, isn't the solution, and you talk about this a lot education? And they have put bulls eyes squarely on charter schools and private schools that are giving kids education to prevent them from ever seeing poverty.
Which of course gave the rest of them the opportunity to bash teachers unions, attack one of their favorite targets, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, push for more charter schools, complain about even the remote possibility of the richest among us having their taxes increased and pretend it wouldn't do anything to lessen the massive income disparity we've got in America.
And it gave Tantaros an opportunity to throw in a little race baiting for good measure as well.
TANTAROS: They're essentially picking pockets Bob, almost like poverty pimps, right? So if we can keep this going, like the rat catcher, right?... wants to keep rats running around because, or else he wouldn't have a job. It seems like that's what they're trying to do here.
Which made their only fake "liberal" on the panel, Bob Beckel's head explode. Beckel attempting to inject even a small amount of sanity into the conversation did nothing to stop the attacks on the unions, pushing for school vouchers and a rant from several of them about the potential return of school busing.
Yes folks, in Fox-land, poverty and income inequality in America is the fault of the teachers unions. Those rotten union thugs are responsible for all of our problems.
h/t Media Matters