The "Atruthful" Obama

Amoral is defined this way:

1. not involving questions of right or wrong; without moral quality; neither moral nor immoral.
2. having no moral standards, restraints, or principles; unaware of or indifferent to questions of right or wrong: a completely amoral person.

Substitute the words "truthful" and "untruthful" for "moral" and "immoral" in the definitions above, and you get a pretty good feel for Barack Obama's politics.  For Obama, truth is completely irrelevant.

Benghazi is a good example.  Five days after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at the consulate in Libya, Obama ordered his UN ambassador Susan Rice to go out to all the Sunday news shows to blame their deaths on a Youtube video that was supposedly so insulting that it sparked rioting throughout the middle east.  It was such an unlikely story, but it was one that fit in with Obama's image.  His presidency by itself was supposed to cast a new and attractive light on America for the Muslim world to see.  The planned terrorist attack destroyed that narrative.  Benghazi was a protest. 

Later on President Obama himself went to the UN where he repeated his protest story in a speech to the General Assembly.  Then weeks later during a presidential debate against Mitt Romney he contradicted all that.  To Romney's obvious bafflement, Obama said that he had called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror the day after it happened.  Almost everybody was caught be surprise, except the debate moderator.  In what looked to have been a beautifully choreographed move, Candy Crowley jumped into the debate to declare that, yes, it was true.  She had specifically looked into it and she could confidently support what the president said.  Time to move on to our next debate topic.  Sorry, we really don't have time for more questions on this.  Obama would not have to face questions on where the protest story came from.

Remarkably, Barack Obama went on to win the election.  In the midst of the most dire economic circumstances we've experienced in the last half century, Obama managed to beat out the guy who made a fortune rescuing companies from their own dire economic circumstances and putting them back on their feet.  If ever there was a man equipped to deal with the hardships facing our country, it was Mitt Romney.  Yet the atruthful Obama beat Romney, the turnaround artist.

He did it without offering any kind of a plan to deal with the worst unemloyment in 30 years, or any plan to deal with the rest of our economic problems.  After running trillion dollar deficits for four straight years, boosting the national debt from $10.6 trillion to more than $16 trillion, he managed to sucker just enough people into believing he would fix everything by taxes on 2% of American taxpayers.  Arithmetic anyone? 

Obama said what he had to say, himself and through surrogates.

He said that Romney and the Republicans were waging war on women because they didn't believe the Catholic Church should be forced, against Church doctrine, to pay for women's birth control.  He said that Romney got rich destroying companies, not rescuing them.  He said Romney was a felon, that he misrepresented his position on corporate filings to the SEC.  He said Romeny was responsible for a woman's cancer death.  Her husband lost his job when the company Romney rescued went under, long after the rescue and long after Romney's involvement.  The woman died six years later.

No matter that there was no truth to any of it.  Barack Obama said whatever would defeat Mitt Romney.   And that's where we are now.  America's rescue has been put on indefinite hold.  Obama won.

In place of any expectation of economic growth we have a "fiscal cliff" before us.  A confrontation between Obama and Republicans over spending and taxes looms.  It was contrived by Obama because he thinks that any confrontation with Republicans is one that he will win it.  He might.   Obama will say whatever he has to say to do it.  He said so.

In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn't reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.

It will be hard for the two sides to reach an agreement.  The give and take one might expect during any negotiation are not there.  Obama won the election.  End of story.

At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr. Boehner told the president, "I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?"

"You get nothing," the president said. "I get that for free."

There is no middle ground.  In one sense that's a benefit.  There is next to no time left for negotiating any kind of a deal.  When there is no middle ground there's not much to be negotiated.  The process won't take a lot of time.

After the election, Boehner aides tried to shape the debate by offering early concessions, including that the GOP would agree to raise new tax revenue. A speech Mr. Boehner planned to give was rewritten 18 times and included input from top Republican leaders.

He and Mr. Obama didn't sit down together for another 10 days.

So many other things to do.  Most recently it was vacation.  With only days remaining the Obamas jetted off to Hawaii.  He doesn't want an agreement.

One of the speaker's aides, Brett Loper, asked the president's legislative liaison, "Can you get back into the zone of where you were in July 2011?"—when Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner were close to a large deal on revenues, spending and entitlements. The president's man replied, "No, we were probably overextended then, and there's no way we would do it now."

July 2011.  Think about that.  Here we are a year and a half later, still, with no agreement on revenues, spending, and entitlements.  For a year and a half Barack Obama has been inching the bar higher.  When agreement seems close Obama backs away.  He preserves the confrontation.  Suddenly there are new demands, ones that Obama knows are unacceptable to Republicans.  How about let's permanently raise the debt ceiling?

It's pretty safe to say no opposition congressional majority is going willingly cede power to a president.  If Obama's condition for reaching a deal is permanent removal of the debt ceiling, there will be no deal.  Obama is content with that.  His governing purpose is partisan advantage above all else.  As Kimberly Strassel wrote in the Wall Street Journal today,

For all the ugliness of this lame-duck session, it did have one merit: It has exposed how President Obama intends to govern in a second term. He's intent on narrow political victories and on damaging his opponents.

Where confrontations don't exist, Obama will contrive one.  He'll say what he has to say so that Republcans are blamed for something.  The country will suffer damage as well, but like the truth, that's irrelevant.

Comments

[Go4crikit]

You have forgotten just who Barack Obama is. Barack Obama is NOT a Democrat. Barack Obama doesn't like Americans, not just Republicans. Barack Obama wants to be the LAST American President. Barack Obama only wants one thing: for The United States of America to GO AWAY.
Sorry, but this one truth is the essential truth about Barack Obama; He is actively seeking America's destruction.

[Tom Bowler]

I doubt it.