If I had to credit Barack Obama with one thing, it would be knowing his market. He understands that with an America so dumbed-down, and a media so prostrate before him, he can get away with lies previous presidents wouldn’t dare contemplate.
A good example — but far from the worst — is the current battle over sequestration, a fancy word for fantasy budget cuts. Obama has been engaging in demagoguery, blaming Republicans for these impending “cuts,” calling them “brutal” and a “meat cleaver” approach. What is the truth?
Sequestration was Obama’s idea.
He proposed it in 2011 as part of the budget deal. Congress then passed it with the support of not just Republicans such as John Boehner, but also some colleagues named Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And after the GOP-controlled House and Democrat-controlled Senate approved the bill, Obama signed this “meat cleaver” approach into law. But it gets worse.
The sequester isn’t any kind of cleaver approach, but more of an Eddie Haskell one. As Forbes’ Paul Roderick Gregory wrote:
The sequester has been advertised as “cutting” discretionary spending over a ten year period by $995 billion. After inflation adjustments and exempting more than a trillion dollars of defense and non defense discretionary spending from the sequester, the CBO projects (in its Table 1.1) discretionary spending to increase by $110 billion over the decade. There is no actual $995 billion cut after the CBO applies its magic adjustments. Rather there is a $110 billion increase.
With a meat cleaver like that, your butcher would have your cholesterol shooting up like … well, our budget.
But this isn’t unusual. What Washington calls “cuts” are virtually always just reductions in the rate of spending growth. Here’s how the con works: it’s built into the system that the budget will automatically increase every year. And this is taken so for granted that if anyone proposes a reduction in this already inflated budget projection, it’s called a “cut.”
And what if the cuts were real? They would amount to approximately $99 billion a year out of a budget of $3.5 trillion. Calling this “brutal” is a bit like the Okefenokee Swamp losing three mosquitoes and calling it rape of the ecosystem.
By the way, 3.5 trillion one dollar bills stacked up would reach all the way to the moon.
Another Obama lie was the pressure-through-prevarication technique he used on the Supreme Court when it was reviewing his healthcare law. Here is what he said at the time:
I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress…. [F]or years what we have heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.
“Unprecedented”? “Extraordinary”? All laws are duly passed by a democratically elected Congress.
And the Supreme Court has been overturning them for 200 years.
Moreover, if merely striking down a law constituted “judicial activism,” the Court should then never overturn legislation and would have no reason to exist. In reality, judicial activism is when the Court acts contrary to the Constitution — this includes when it refuses to strike down an unconstitutional law such as Obamacare.
Of course, being a “constitutional scholar,” Obama certainly knows all this. So what explains his patently incorrect statement? It’s simple: he is banking on the electorate being so ignorant and the media so compliant that he can tell people up is down, war is peace, and freedom is slavery and not be taken to task.
But even this pales in comparison to the lie Obama told at Hampton University in Virginia on June 5, 2007. While speaking to a primarily black audience Ebonics style — even though he never actually lived in a black community — Obama worked the crowd, accusing America of cruel indifference toward the mostly black victims of Hurricane Katrina. He made his case by referencing the Stafford Act, which requires localities receiving federal disaster aid to pony up 10 percent as much money as Washington does. He said:
When 9/11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act…. And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation; we don’t expect you to come up with your own money. Here, here’s the money to rebuild … because you’re part of the American family.’ What’s happening down in New Orleans?! Where’s your dollar?! Where’s your Stafford Act money?! Makes no sense…. Tells me that somehow the [black] people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much.
Pretty damning, huh? Now for the rest of the story. As I reported last year:
Barely two weeks before Obama gave the Hampton U. speech, the US Senate had in fact waived the Stafford Act for New Orleans. Moreover, that city ended up receiving more aid than Florida and NYC combined. But that’s not all. As Thomas Sowell wrote:
Unlike Jeremiah Wright’s church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against — repeat, AGAINST — the legislation which included the waiver.
The president’s defenders say that Obama voted for a previous version of the Stafford Act waiver and only opposed the bill that ultimately passed because it didn’t contain a timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Fair enough. But the fact still remains that he was present when the waiver was passed. The fact still remains that, donning his old community agitator’s hat, he then went before a black audience and claimed it wasn’t passed. And he clearly implied that this was due to white “racism.”
But if former Obama aide Neera Tanden is correct, it’s no surprise that the president was willing to take a meat cleaver to human relations. After all, said she about her former boss, “It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.”
Actually, though, it’s far from stunning, as politics has a long history of attracting leaders who don’t like people. Why, some of them would even stoke the fires of ethnic and racial hatred and use the Big Lie technique — just like Barack Obama.
