I am not a big fan of Chris Wallace of Fox News, but to his credit, he called BS on transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg yesterday in an eight-and-a-half-minute interview on Fox News Sunday, even while letting the biggest lie pass with no comment.

Wallace let slide the most egregious misrepresentation: that less than 10% of the multi-trillion-dollar so-called "infrastructure" bill for which Buttigieg has become a point man is dedicated to genuine infrastructure — roads, bridges, airports, and the power grid.  That was not of interest to Wallace.  There are limits to his willingness to challenge progressives.

In fact, Wallace has adopted a new expression, "hard infrastructure," to talk about genuine infrastructure, so as to leave open the use of the term "infrastructure" for the sort of nonsense notoriously spouted by Kirsten Gillibrand.  ("Paid leave is infrastructure.  Child care is infrastructure.  Caregiving is infrastructure.")

 Wallace's focus, instead, was on the claims of jobs that purportedly would be added by the bill, according to a study by Moody's Analytics — whose pro-Democrat bias has been repeatedly exposed by Jack Hellner (here, here, here, and here, for instance).  Even taking Moody's estimate on its own terms, Buttigieg was clearly guilty of misrepresentation.  Thus, Wallace began the segment asking: "Why not be straight with the American people?"

You see, Buttigieg has used the number of 19 million jobs being created by the bill, but that is simply untrue.  The Moody's study actually said most of those jobs would be created regardless of passage of the bill.  Only 2.7 million jobs, by its generous estimate, would be created by the bill itself.

Buttigieg's response was classic: "I should have been more precise."  Later on, he continued the dodge of claiming imprecision when caught lying and stated, "Yeah, you're right; I should be very precise..."

He also claimed overwhelming support for the bull from the public, including Republicans and independents, but the polling (which I presume he was referencing) measured only the desire for better roads and other facilities, not support for the 93% of the bill that is unrelated to infrastructure (except in the minds of softheads like Gillibrand).

He also used a familiar dodge for advocates of spending, citing the study of a directly concerned interest group:

The American Society of Civil Engineers rates our infrastructure... we've been getting a lot of C's and D's...

Guess where jobs for civil engineers come from!  Were this group to tell us that our infrastructure is not in a crisis situation, its membership's job prospects would be diminished.

Still, it is entertaining to see how Buttigieg, perhaps the smarmiest and most annoying member of the Biden Cabinet, handled direct criticism:

Photo credit: YouTube screen grab.

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