The Obama Campaign: No Sex, But Plenty of Lies and Videotape

So the best the Obama campaign can come up with following the President’s breathtakingly poor performance in last week’s debate is to send out talking-points memos and spear carriers to call Romney a liar at every turn and to anyone who will listen.  It takes brass (to borrow from former President Clinton) for Obama and his minions, who have relegated the value of truth and accuracy to just about the lowest coin in the realm to call anyone a liar.

When it comes to the Obama campaign, truth has taken a holiday.  We are bombarded night after night with ads, which start out with “This is Barack Obama and I approve this message.”  Get ready for some cringing untruths because if the fairytale of Pinocchio were true, the noses of the people in the White House, starting at the top, would cast a shadow.  As Karl Rove pointed out in one of his recent op‑ed pieces in The Wall Street Journal, getting a sense of how comprehensive the President’s assault on the truth has been, consider some of his false claims in recent speeches and ads.

One Obama commercial says, “To pay for huge new tax breaks for millionaires like him, Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class $2,000 for a family with children.”  That claim has been completely discredited by PolitiFact Virginia and editorials in The Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Romney, unlike the President, is committed to cutting taxes for everyone, including the middle class.  Another ad says, “As a corporate raider Mr. Romney shipped jobs to China and Mexico.”  Of all things the liberal Washington Post said in response, “On just about every level this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue.”

President Obama has claimed that his Justice Department’s botched Fast and Furious gun running program was begun under the previous administration.  Actually, the program was started in October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency.

Then there is the disgraceful specter of the President of United States going before the United Nations groveling because the government did not approve the video of the prophet Muhammad that Muslim clerics and rioters have used to justify rampaging throughout Arab countries, and for invading our embassy and killing our Ambassador and others.  That action was an act of war, not much different than the invasion of our Embassy in Iran in 1979.  The response has been quite the same.  Jimmy Carter had a feckless response and so did President Obama.

President Obama also told us that premiums for health insurance would go down by $2,500 a family during his first term.  Actually, according to Kaiser Health Insurance, insurance premiums for individuals have increased 16% for individuals and 18% for families during Obama’s presidency.  Moreover, you can’t reduce overall costs when government forces an increase in demand even if it caps insurance premiums and shifts costs elsewhere, or imposes rationing.

All one needs to do is go to a reliable source like FactCheck and you can review some of the other statements on which President Obama has based his campaign.  He claimed that Romney and Ryan would cut Pell Grants for low-income college students.  Not so, says FactCheck.  President Obama has said that his budget will cut the deficit by $4 trillion over ten years.  Let’s examine that one in detail.  First of all, he has never had a budget passed during his first four years in office. His own party rejects his budgets.   He added $6 trillion to the national debt during that time, and now he claims he has a plan to cut the deficit by $4 trillion.  How?  Where?  Does he have a secret plan like Richard Nixon had to end the war in Vietnam?

The President commented during one of his frequent stops in Iowa that Paul Ryan, as one of the leaders of Congress, was standing in the way of the passage of the 2012 Farm Bill, and he said, “If you happen to see Congressman Ryan, tell him how important this bill is to Iowa and our rural communities.”  Actually, the House of Representatives passed the bill on August 2, and Congressman Ryan voted yes.

Then there was the very famous Obama statement that anybody who had created jobs or developed some innovative business really owed their success to the government.  “You did not build that” he said.  Hardly true; an insult to small business and innovators of which America has supplied abundance.

Let’s look at the energy industry.  In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama said that American oil production is the highest it is has been in 8 years.  He fails to mention that that is in spite of, not because of, his Administration.  All of the new oil production has been on private lands, while the president has kept oil locked up on federally owned lands.   And that’s not surprising when you have a President who is literally tilting at windmills trying to support American industry with wind and solar power, and who has dissed coal, of which America has an abundance.  President Obama has also said that we have run out of places to drill for oil.  In fact, the United States is sitting on a petroleum treasure the equivalent of Saudi Arabia from which we can extract oil through fracking.  That, of course, has been blocked by the President’s actions.

The President refused to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, because his schedule would not permit it.  So where was President Obama during Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to the United Nations?  He was airing a segment of the liberal woman’s talk show The View.  Obviously, that was far more important to him than discussing Israeli security with the Prime Minister.  In fact what he has done, is put the Israelis in the impossible position of being alone on the frontline demanding that a redline be drawn to stop the Iranians from enriching more nuclear fuel.  This is an issue of survival to Israel. The President claims he is Israel’s best friend, but he won’t join in and draw a line in the sand as Iran, which calls for Israel’s destruction, draws closer and closer to nuclear capability. How can he ask Israel to abandon their right to make a first strike, if in fact, they believe that their existence is at stake through the actions of a rogue nation that denies the Holocaust ever occurred, and who has repeatedly said that Israel should be wiped off the map?

In his first term, President Obama opposed same sex marriage given that 31 states had banned same-sex marriage.   As the election grew near, however, and more and more states were passing pro same sex marriage or civil union legislation President Obama suddenly became a believer.

Most importantly, President Obama was going to create jobs and reduce unemployment in the United States, which was 7.3% when he assumed office. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that unemployment was at 7.8 % in September after lingering above 8% for 42 months of the Obama presidency. Unfortunately the BLS also determined that the number of people in the work force in September declined to 45.1%. More specifically, in September, 2.5 million persons were only marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. These individuals were not in the labor force, but wanted and were available for work. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.  Among the “marginally attached”, there were 802,000 discouraged workers in September, Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.7 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in September had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

What new ideas does the President have for economic growth to get that stubborn unemployment rate below the 6% that he promised (three years ago) wouldn’t be exceeded once his stimulus plans were passed?  What is he going to do to create jobs?  Many of the people who are unemployed realize that the rate is actually well above 7.8% or even 8%, because many people have simply stopped looking for work. Not many jobs can be created when the economy is growing at 1.3% per quarter, a disastrous growth rate out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

Barack Obama is not only not contrite about his broken promises and disastrous record, he goes on the attack.  Even the Congressional Budget Office has said that the Democratic plans that President Obama has floated would increase the budget.  President Obama says he will freeze a portion of the discretionary budget, but as the Cato Institute reports, over 80% of the budget will be off limits to any cuts.  Other than his stimulus programs, the real explosion in spending is occurring in the entitlements that he refuses to touch.  The long and the short of it is, President Obama could be about to defy gravity.  His prevarications have been exposed, and yet the American public may be poised to re-elect him.  What will this country become with four more years of the same policies? We think we’ll look a lot like Europe does now.