Ever since David Vitter and Mary Landrieu pulled their holds on Jack Lew’s nomination as President Obama’s budget chief and allowed him to move into the administration’s higher echelons, Lew has shown why those holds shouldn’t have been pulled.

The holds were put in place as a protest of Obama’s Gulf drilling moratorium, but as a matter of principle they worked just fine.

Because if Lew had been kaiboshed as OMB director, perhaps a couple of trillion-dollar budget deficits might have been avoided (unlikely, but perhaps).

And if Lew had never been allowed to be Obama’s chief of staff you wouldn’t have this embarrassing spectacle…

Of course, what Lew said was patently false. The budget is not subject to a filibuster, and it never has been – at least not for decades. If it was, we wouldn’t have Obamacare – it was the budget reconciliation process that Harry Reid misused to hang Obamacare on us two years ago.

Reid hasn’t used that process to produce an actual budget for over 1,000 days, mind you. He used it to deform the American health care system, but not to do what he’s legally required to do.

ABC News’ Jake Tapper picked up on the White House press office’s feeble attempt to walk back the “gaffe”…

White House officials did not dispute that Lew misspoke. When asked about the discrepancy, a White House official said “the chief of staff was clearly referencing the general gridlock in Congress that makes accomplishing even the most basic tasks nearly impossible given the Senate Republicans’ insistence on blocking an up or down vote on nearly every issue.”

And if you believe that, you’ll believe that some 95 percent of the American people won’t see their taxes raised in this administration.

Because Lew also went on Meet the Press and said the exact same thing.

One is a gaffe. Now it’s an abject lie.

Which is par for the course for this administration. They will lie with impunity even when they know the lie is immediately provable.

Zero credibility. And zero budget in well over 1,000 days.

Obama is presenting his budget proposal today, and it’s a pure academic exercise. Reid won’t move a budget this year; he’s already said so. We’ll continue spending on a continuing resolution, because that’s the only way to maintain trillion-dollar deficits.

This will not get better until Obama is gone and Reid is in the minority. By that time we might well be Greece.