DANIEL GREENFIELD: EVERY WORD A LIE
“My first thought was, he lied in every word.” So began Browning’s famous poem and so began Bill O’Reilly’s interview of Obama.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-lied-with-every-word/print/
Obama’s game plan was to exploit Bill O’Reilly’s image by rebranding himself as a post-partisan politician with common sense solutions. Repeating his dishonest refrain, “That’s not a liberal or a conservative agenda” or “It’s not a Democratic or Republican thing” he tried to reinvent himself as a politician for all people to the FOX News audience.
Some of the policies that Obama kept insisting were neither liberal nor conservative, neither Democrat nor Republican, included raising the minimum wage, raising taxes and yet another stimulus plan. These policies may be archetypically liberal, but Obama carries his own reality with him, his own mathematics, his own history, his own dictionary and his own moral code which he adapts to the moment.
Julia’s sugar daddy, whose ObamaCare disaster comes packaged with a marriage penalty that can go as high as $10,000, insisted with a straight face that he is always campaigning for family values.
When Obama doesn’t like a question, he rephrases it. Challenged by Bill O’Reilly on the 72 percent out of wedlock birth rate among black women, he rephrased it as a question about the importance of men paying child support and taking responsibility for their children.
But he avoided the M word: marriage.
There was no marriage in the Life of Julia and no marriage mentioned in Obama’s long stumbling reply. No husbands and wives; only “men” like stray dogs being told to take responsibility for their children.
Instead Obama pivoted from child support to the economy to the lack of jobs to education, spinning around until the compass needle pointed right back to his welfare state agenda.
Obama’s policies punish married couples while rewarding single parents, promoting a culture where marriage is disposable and the family is only one option among many, and his solution to solving a problem created by the welfare state, by the collapse of industry, extended education regimens and generous social rewards for single motherhood, was more of the same.
According to him, the only way to put out the fire is with more gasoline.
Challenged on vouchers, Obama lied to protect the education union lobby and claimed that school vouchers don’t improve performance for minority students.
“Every study that’s been done on school vouchers, Bill, says that it has very limited impact if any,” Obama said. In reality, a recent study by Matthew Chingos of the Brookings Institution and Paul E. Peterson of Harvard showed that school vouchers increased black college enrollment by 24%.
That’s a dramatic difference but not one that Obama and his backers are interested in because they don’t care about black students except as counters in the welfare state’s bankrupt budget game.
Obama is willing to annoy teachers unions and public school fanatics by offering some limited support to charter schools, which is more than the new generation of left-wing extremist politicians like Bill de Blasio will do, but he isn’t about to risk the whole system that indoctrinates generations of voters and bestows union dues on Democrats running for public office.
Studies have shown that minority students stuck in failing schools have the most to gain from vouchers. Obama has spent enough time on education policy to know that truth, but instead he chose to lie on national television by claiming that not only some select studies, but that “every study” supports his education lobby anti-student position.
On Keystone, Obama challenged O’Reilly’s job numbers even though he had used the methodology of treating temporary jobs as “created jobs” when pitching programs. After the latest positive State Department report, with no remaining basis for further delays, Obama shifted responsibility over to Kerry, as if the Senator from Damascus were qualified to overrule the experts who had already spoken.
Last year Obama claimed that he was hindering the Keystone pipeline over global warming worries. Now that it has gotten the Warmist seal of approval, he’s building another wall of obstacles while pretending to be a disinterested party.
Asked if he was the most liberal president in history, Obama claimed that Nixon was more liberal than him because he started the EPA. Anyone else would have been laughed off the stage for that alone. The EPA had been assembled out of legislatively created organizations, and Nixon’s State of the Union in 1970 had emphasized clean water and air, not Obama’s warmist carbon fantasies.
“Street litter, rundown parking strips and yards, dilapidated fences, broken windows, smoking automobiles, dingy working places,” Nixon had said running down his list of things that needed cleaning up. And he concluded by emphasizing, “We need a fresh climate in America, one in which a person can breathe freely and breathe in freedom.”
That climate of freedom is the opposite of what Obama and his secretive and vicious EPA thugs who, carry out armed raids on Republican donors and use covert emails and secret coordination with activist groups to sideline the law while trying to regulate everything on the planet as a pollutant, represent.
Haltingly, Obama invoked FDR and insisted that the country needed to spend 2 trillion on infrastructure. “That’s not a liberal or conservative agenda.” Not unless you consider FDR’s New Deal a liberal agenda.
Obama insisted, “We could put people to work right now.” But he had already promised and failed to deliver on that in his first term. In his second term, he is still dishonestly promising to create shovel ready jobs, after already admitting that there was no such thing, while ridiculing Keystone’s jobs.
“We have not massively expanded the welfare state,” Obama claimed even as food stamp enrollment has increased by 70 percent under him so that 1 in 5 households are now on food stamps. Eight million people have been added to the rolls and ObamaCare is set to increase the already bloated rolls by another 3 to 5 percent in some states.
The number of Americans on disability has increased by 23 percent under Obama. The 5.9 million added to the disability rolls represent more than double the number of jobs that he claims to have created.
“They gotta work hard, they gotta be responsible,” Obama finished. “That’s what it’s all about. That’s how you and I ended up sitting here talking.”
The culmination of all his absurd lies was the pretense that his elevation to the highest office in the land after spending not even a full term in the senate was on the basis of merit. Two years after going from the Illinois State Senate to the United States Senate, he had already launched a campaign for the White House making him the least qualified candidate put forward by a major party in a century.
In the White House, Obama hasn’t worked hard and he hasn’t been responsible. He has made it on the strength of his ability to string together one lie after another after another, covering each disaster with a fresh deception. His interview with Bill O’Reilly represented that same politics of dishonesty.
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