The left’s insane “Bush lies” mantra was the opposite of the truth. If anything, he was scrupulous to a fault with the facts. To take the classic example, the famous “sixteen words” of his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address were, as we argued on this site repeatedly and at length, exactly accurate. And yet Condoleezza Rice publicly regretted them and George Tenet was forced to apologize for them.
No such scruples appear to bind President Obama. How many falsehoods did he retail in the service of selling Obamacare? That if you liked your insurance, you could keep it. (False.) That it is reducing costs. (False.) That it would give “everyone” access to coverage. (False.) That it was fiscally sound and would pay for itself. (False.) And so, endlessly, on.
The same pattern of falsely stated facts applies to Obama’s promotion of his so-called American Jobs Act or, as I like to think of it, his Jobbing America Act. It’s another thinly disguised round of tax hikes and stimulus spending. How’d the first round work out? It worked out so well that Obama can’t even describe the the second round for what it is.
Last week Obama called a hastily scheduled press conference to advocate passage of the bill. A transcript of the press conference is here. Betsy Newmark asked afterwards, how many lies Obama could pack into one press conference, and usefully collected a few specimen examples.
Here is one more:
“I had a chance to meet a young man named Robert Baroz,” the president said at a midday news conference. “He’s got two decades of teaching experience. He’s got a masters degree. He’s got an outstanding track record of helping his students make huge gains in reading and writing. In the last few years, he’s received three pink slips because of budget cuts. Why wouldn’t we want to pass a bill that puts somebody like Robert back in the classroom teaching our kids?”
As the Boston Herald pointed out, there were only two problems with with that one paragraph: Obama never met Baroz. And Baroz remains happily employed.
Aaron Goldstein expressly invoked the Bush comparison without noting how it favors Bush. Goldstein commented:
It’s quite telling that President Obama couldn’t find a highly qualified teacher in the Boston Public Schools to talk about who is actually unemployed. It would seem that liberals who accused President Bush of lying about WMD don’t care if President Obama lies if it promotes a cause with which they agree. It’s OK for President Obama to lie if it is in service of “a higher truth.” The ends justifies the means. So what else is new?
Obama also cited “independent economists” to support the supposed benefits of putting the federal budget an additional $447 billion in the hole. Obama was referring to Mark Zandi, but Zandi is a registered Democrat who believes in the Keynesian withcraft. How have Zandi’s predictions worked out in the past? Not so well. And one can only wonder why the size of the Jobbing America Act is so modest in light of the wonders the Keynesian withcraft works.
JOHN adds: If wasteful government spending were the key to economic growth, Zimbabwe would be the richest place on Earth.
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