Page 28 - Thomas Ricks News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Already being pushed on fox news. fox has devoted countless hours of air time to the benghazi skoir booking guests to pedal the conspiracy theories. but today something rare happened. fox news invited journalist thomas ricks to share his thoughts about the whole thing. he reports the truth for a living. so needless to say his interview was cut short. >> senator john mccain said he would block any attempt to nominate susan rice to become secretary of state. she's currently the u.n. ambassador. he seems to be backing away from that. what do you make of that? >> i think that benghazi generally wa...

>> no. nobody does because nobody cared. we know that several hundred died, but there was never an official count done of security contractors in iraq. so when i see this focus on what was essentially a small fire fight, i have covered a lot of fire fights. it's impossible to figure out what happens in them sometimes. and second, i think that the emphasis on benghazi has been political partly because fox was operating as a wing of the republican party. >> all right. tom ricks, thank you for joining us today. >> let's turn to michael tomasky. that was one for the archives. your latest column is...

Died in iraq? do you know? >> i don't. >> no. nobody does because nobody cared. we know that several hundred died, but there was never an official count done of security contractors in iraq. so when i see this focus on what was essentially a small fire fight, i have covered a lot of fire fights. it's impossible to figure out what happens in them sometimes. and second, i think that the emphasis on benghazi has been political partly because fox was operate iing as a wing of the republican party. >> all right. tom ricks, thank you for joining us today. >> let's turn to michael tomasky. that was o...

0 at least i think he did. but it also seems like the white house is still considering another grand bargain. >> i think what we need to do is let's go for the big deal. let's go for something that we can say for a 10, 20-year period, our country is on the right path. the only way that gets done is for republicans to step out and get mercilessly criticized and that means democrats are going to have to do tough things that they will get criticized by their left. >> if this sounds familiar, it should. in 2011 the president brokered a deal to avoid crashing through the debt ceiling. the deal was ...

members of the inner circle. so when asked how to stand up, people should listen to this guy. >> we want to engage in entitlement reform. medicare, medicaid, these are chief drivers of the deficit. there's other spending we have to cut. >> hold on a second. i think that we all know what the chief drivers of our deficit are and have been. our projected deficit has driven by the wars and the bush tax cuts. entitlement programs don't even compete with these costs. plouffe went on to pin the problem largely on republicans who are not flexible, but he also said this. >> where the big bott...