I'm not going to pretend that Fox News has any interest in giving their viewers a fair -- or even accurate -- picture of health care reform. They've been talking “socialized medicine” and “death panels” for months and aren't showing any sign of stopping now that the health care reform bill is poised to become law.

But it takes a special kind of chutzpah to offer up Rudy Giuliani as some sort of authority on health care reform, which is what Fox & Friends did this morning.

Just as a quick reminder, the last time Giuliani was spotted delving into health care was in the middle of his catastrophic failure of a presidential campaign. In August 2007 he offered up a health care reform proposal that -- well, perhaps “proposal” is too strong a word. Let's say that he gave a speech in which he said the words “health care” more times than usual, but spent the majority of it attacking the Democratic plot to enact “socialist” health policies.

What policy prescriptions he did offer were laughably vague and essentially ripped off a health care plan President Bush put forward and ultimately abandoned. Giuliani said at the time that he didn't know how much his “plan” would cost, nor could he say how many uninsured Americans it would cover. But health care policy wonk Ezra Klein deconstructed Giuliani's plan, such as it was, and reached this conclusion: “So Giuliani's proposal -- if it were more generous than it actually is, and would really cut premiums in half -- might reduce the ranks of the uninsured by three percent.” Moreover, Giuliani himself acknowledged that his plan was reliant on the magic of the free market, and might have taken several years to lower costs to the point that the lucky three percent could actually afford health insurance.

In his appearance on Fox & Friends, Giuliani several times described the soon-to-be-signed bill as a “disaster” for New York, and rehashed the same garbage he spewed on the campaign trail: “The reality is this is not health care reform. This is a Democratic ideological commitment to moving towards socialized medicine. It has nothing to do with reforming health care. ... This is really ideology trumping good sense, and it's a left wing ideology. Most Democrats would have loved to have seen socialized medicine. They would have loved to have seen single-payer system, they acknowledged that. This was a big step in that direction.”

In short, Rudy Giuliani is not someone who takes seriously or even understands health care policy. And on Fox News that makes him an expert.

UPDATE: Turns out America's Mayor was also on MSNBC's Morning Joe earlier today to talk health care, though, to their credit, the MSNBC hosts actually challenged Giuliani on whether his uninformed rhetoric is “constructive” and openly mocked his claim that Obama pushed health care reform and the auto company bailouts solely for the benefit of the unions. Still, no one seems able to explain why Giuliani is a sought-after voice on health care policy.