Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's Fox and Friends on FNC, conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham asserted that former Obama administration Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner should have resigned when he was asked to lie about the role Social Security plays in the federal government's fiscal problems.
After a quote from Geithner's book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, in which he recalled that Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer asked him to claim publicly that Social Security does not play a role in the budget deficit as a "dog whistle" to the left. [See video below.]
Ingraham took a crack at how liberals view their base voters as she began her response:
Couple of things there. Number one: We now know that the left considers its base a bunch of unruly canines, okay, dog whistle. So they look down at their base, okay, number one.
The conservative host continued:
Number two, and these biographies, authorized biographies, do you recognize a trend here? The author or the subject of the biography always comes off in the best possible light. So Tim Geithner, "Well, I objected to this, and I thought this was bad."
Ingraham then got to her recommendation that the then-Treasury Secretary should have resigned:
Well, if this was actually going on in the White House --and I don't deny that it was, by the way -- I think it probably was, given everything else they've said about ObamaCare and the recovery and so forth, but didn't Tim Geithner, as a public servant, have a duty to actually resign at that point or go to the American people and say, "You know something, I'm being asked to say things that are actually untrue, and I'm not going to do it because I actually believe in ultimate truths, and the truth is Social Security is a driver of our debt, and we're in real trouble when it comes to funding Social Security."
Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Tuesday, May 13, Fox and Friends on FNC:
BRIAN KILMEAD: When you write your biography, make sure when you do your book tour deny most of the quotes in it. That's the kind of start the former Treasury Secretary off to. Listen to what Timothy Geithner is quoted as saying in his own book. In his authorized biography, he says, quote:
QUOTE APPEARS ON SCREEN AS KILMEAD PARAPHRASES: I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn't contribute to the deficit It wasn't a main driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute. Pfeiffer said the line was a "dog whistle" to the left, a phrase I had never heard before. He had to explain that the phrase was code for the Democratic base, signaling that we intend to protect Social Security.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Couple of things there, guys. Couple of things. Number one: We now know that the left considers its base a bunch of unruly canines, okay, dog whistle. So they look down at their base, okay, number one.
Number two, and these biographies, authorized biographies, do you recognize a trend here? The author or the subject of the biography always comes off in the best possible light. So Tim Geithner, "Well, I objected to this, and I thought this was bad."
Well, if this was actually going on in the White House --and I don't deny that it was, by the way -- I think it probably was, given everything else they've said about ObamaCare and the recovery and so forth, but didn't Tim Geithner, as a public servant, have a duty to actually resign at that point or go to the American people and say, "You know something, I'm being asked to say things that are actually untrue, and I'm not going to do it because I actually believe in ultimate truths, and the truth is Social Security is a driver of our debt, and we're in real trouble when it comes to funding Social Security."
But instead, what he does is he stays in office, he stays in the Cabinet, and then he, you know, allows this book to be written and he comes out with this book, and we're all supposed to say, "Oh, Tim Geithner, you're really a stand-up guy." I think these people whose salaries we pay have a duty to the people, not to Dan Pfeiffer or the President of the United States. Their duty is to the taxpayers who pay their salaries, and Tim Geithner, I think, on this issue, should have actually come forward and said something at the time.
STEVE DOOCY: Sure, well, you know what, by that standard, then, Susan Rice, who was told-
INGRAHAM: Right.
DOOCY: -just exactly the same way, she was told, "Go out there and say it was a video." He was told, "Go out there and lie on TV." They were both told to go out and lie on TV. Then, by that measure, Susan Rice should say, "Laura Ingraham's got a good point. I should quit."
INGRAHAM: I mean, would you guys do the same thing? Would you do it? If someone said to me, "I want you to go out there, and this isn't really true, but we want to tamp down this Benghazi deal," "It's going to look bad for us and our base are going to get all pavlovian on us if we talk about Social Security. So go out and kind of downplay it, say it doesn't have anything," I would go tell them, "You better find someone else to do this dirty work."
