Did House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) really tell Fox News host Greta Van Susteren that President Barack Obama cares more about the March Madness college basketball spreads than about balancing the federal budget, on Tuesday, March 12th? This writer thought she was imagining things, but Justin Sink from The Hill heard it, too:

“How can a president not want to balance the budget? How does he forgot what he said? One of his first goals in the first four years was to cut the deficit in half. Now he doesn’t care. He doesn’t even produce a budget,” McCarthy told Fox News. “I’ll bet you this. I bet you he spends more time filling out his March Madness brackets than he does writing a budget.”

The congressman then proceeded to rant about Obama’s non-existent refusal to deal with the budget for an excruciating six minutes and thirty five seconds, with Van Susteren barely being able to get a word in edgewise. After this segment, the poor woman probably had to burn her power suit and spend hours in the shower scouring all that rabid dog spittle from her flesh.

So McCarthy’s saying the black guy in the White House is lazy and likes basketball? Whoa — that’s a double dog-whistle! Well done, if you’re into that sort of thing, but that dog won’t hunt. This ongoing conservative trope about our president’s supposed “laziness” is growing tiresome. As Matthew Cooper observes in the National Journal , “The idea that any president is lazy is absurd, given the constant demands of the job.”

Although MarketWatch attributes its rosy projections partly to the sequester, Robb’s article clearly credits higher revenue for February’s deficit reduction:

The improvement in February was driven by a 19% increase in revenue compared with same month one year ago one year ago.Two factors were at play behind the gain. The government received more revenue from higher payroll taxes as a temporary cut in payroll taxes expired at the end of 2012.

Which begs the question: Since increased revenues so clearly have a positive effect on the GOP’s stated goal of reducing the deficit, why must the working and middle classes shoulder the entire burden with no help from their more well-off fellow citizens? It’s not as though the White House has no budget plan. The president’s “Balanced Plan To Avert The Sequester And Reduce The Deficit” calls for $4 trillion in deficit reduction and is posted right on the WhiteHouse.Gov Web site for all to see:

President Obama believes that our guiding focus must be growing the economy and strengthening the middle class. That’s his North Star, and it’s why he won’t accept cuts that force the middle class to bear the burden of deficit reduction.

Back in February, Felicia Sonmez from the Washington Post reported that — in the president’s defense — White House Press Secretary Jay Carney pointed out that the “substance” of the budget matters more than the timing. Unlike the “highly partisan” budgets passed by the GOP-led House of Representatives, Obama “has put forward consistently budgets that achieve what the American people overwhelmingly support.” The White House’s budget proposal is scheduled to be released on the week of April 8th. Here’s the egregious video with McCarthy’s ranting on Van Susteren’s show, if you can stomach watching it:

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