At least President Obama is honest. Or so goes the common perception. He tried, maybe he made mistakes, the other side was mean to him, but through it all, he didn’t lie.
That view got smithereened this week. It was always hard to believe the president’s repeated claim that he didn’t know his own secretary of state was using an off-the-books email server to avoid public scrutiny, in the process virtually guaranteeing that she would commit multiple felonies by taking classified information into the open.
Now we know Obama was lying. His own aides said so, in emails uncovered by WikiLeaks and made public this week.
In March 2015, Obama made the ridiculous claim that he had learned about Clinton’s email server “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.” In fact, not only did he know she was using a private email address for state business, but he had corresponded with her via that address.
“We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov,” Cheryl Mills, a top aide, wrote to John Podesta, another senior adviser, on March 7, 2015.
Obama spokesman Josh Earnest did indeed try to “clean this up,” two days later, by changing the subject.
“The point that the president was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address — he did — but he was not aware of the details of how that email address and server had been set up, or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act,” Earnest said.
Our president is an ordinary politician who lies for the same reason other pols do.
Try that technique on your wife sometime when she finds out you were at a blonde’s house when you said you were going to church. “I didn’t mean to say I was at Holy Name — I wasn’t — but I just want to clarify that I was not aware of what year the church was built.”
Despite the sacred sheen of Obama idealism that the media have been struggling to keep polished all these years, our president is an ordinary politician who lies for the same reason other pols do. He thinks whatever means he uses are justified by the ends — his awesome mission to make America a better place.
In promoting ObamaCare, Obama repeatedly and shamelessly lied to the American people: “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too,” he said on June 6, 2009, in one of dozens of similar remarks. Obama knew this was untrue at the time; it was built into the plan that millions would lose the health plans they had.
There is a distinction between lies and political BS.
BS can involve starry-eyed thinking that won’t survive acquaintance with reality. Obama might have actually believed himself when he promised “the most transparent administration in history.” Today it’s obvious that instead, Obama’s White House has been “one of the most secretive,” as Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan put it.
It wasn’t mere BS when Obama lied about Benghazi: “We revealed to the American people exactly what we understood at the time,” he said on Feb. 2, 2014, though his administration knew the night of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks that they were planned, terrorist acts. On Sept. 16, 2012, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, working from White House-approved talking points, repeatedly blamed the Benghazi attacks on a nonexistent protest over an inflammatory video.
Obama thinks whatever means he uses are justified by the ends — his awesome mission to make America a better place.
Obama lied about the Fast and Furious operation that allowed some 2,500 firearms to be bought by Mexican drug cartels. One such gun was used to murder US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry: “The Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration,” Obama said on Sept. 20, 2012. In fact, the program was launched by Obama’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in October 2009.
Obama lied about immigration: “My position hasn’t changed,” he said on Nov. 20, 2014, as he announced unilateral executive action to normalize the status of illegal immigrants, a move he had repeatedly and correctly said he lacked the authority to make.
Obama lied about the IRS’s targeting of conservatives, even contradicting his own statements that the harassment was “inexcusable” and made him “angry” on May 15, 2013. Less than a year later, when the heat was off, he said there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” and the IRS’s vendetta against right-leaning groups was totally excusable as a bureaucratic snafu.
You get the idea; Google “Politifact Obama false” for lots more along the same lines.
Once upon a time, when we were all bedazzled by his freshness, Obama set about saying whatever it took to get elected. Remember when he promised health care negotiations would be broadcast on C-SPAN, when he said his deeply held religious beliefs meant he couldn’t support gay marriage, when he said he would not raise any kind of taxes on families earning less than $250,000?
Faith in him proved enduring. Some of his fanboys insist to this day that Obama is a transcendent figure, a “lightworker.”
Nonsense. He’s just another lying politician.