A pattern that has become apparent in the five week-old presidency of Barack Obama, is that he says one thing before the cameras and does the exact opposite when the cameras have been packed up. I'm amazed by this President's unique ability to stretch the truth in the cause of advancing his own highly partisan agenda. After listening to the sound of the President's high-sounding oratory, the listener is left to ponder the deafening toll left by the hollow ringing of empty words resounding in the backbround. How can someone who seems so sincere before cameras be so sincerely wrong on topics of substance?
This assessment of the President's misteps with truth and candidness are shared by columnists Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn who delve into a little fact checking of Obama's words.
Here is but a sampling of their article:
OBAMA: "We have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and refinance their mortgages. It's a plan that won't help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values."
THE FACTS: If the administration has come up with a way to ensure money only goes to those who got in honest trouble, it hasn't said so. ....... the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. suggested this month it's not likely aid will be denied to all homeowners who overstated their income or assets to get a mortgage they couldn't afford. "I think it's just simply impractical to try to do a forensic analysis of each and every one of these delinquent loans," Sheila Bair told National Public Radio.
OBAMA: "We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before."
THE FACTS: Oil imports peaked in 2005 at just over 5 billion barrels, and have been declining slightly since. The figure in 2007 was 4.9 billion barrels, or about 58 percent of total consumption. The nation is on pace this year to import 4.7 billion barrels, and government projections are for imports to hold steady or decrease a bit over the next two decades.
OBAMA: "Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day."
THE FACTS: This may be so, but it isn't only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries. The Clinton administration championed an easing of banking regulations, including legislation that ended the barrier between regular banks and Wall Street banks. That led to a deregulation that kept regular banks under tight federal regulation but extended lax regulation of Wall Street banks. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later an economic adviser to candidate Obama, was in the forefront in pushing for this deregulation.
Not done with taking swipes at former President George W. Bush whenever it suits his interests, President Obama more than once referred to the budget deficit "that we inherited", during his address before last night's joint session of Congress. What Mr. Obama conveniently failed to mention while delivering his Bush-bashing riffs before the media and his fellow partisans on the Hill, was that he and his administration in two short weeks have managed to TRIPLE the size of the Federal Government's budget deficit over that of his predecessor.
On one side of his mouth, Mr. Obama says that he is for fiscal responsibility and from the other side of his mouth, pushes Congressional Democrats and three Republican Senators to saddle generations of Americans with the most outrageous pork-laden spending bill in U.S. history. After marketing this larded spending binge stuffed with over 9,000 earmarks as an "economic stimulus package" Mr. Obama proclaims before the nation that it is free of pork! This President either believes that by merely giving utterance, he can purge a porcine spending measure of special-interest laden earmarks, or takes the American public for complete fools!
Red State comments that nearly one-fourth of the national debt left by the previous administration was created by Democrats in the two years since they siezed control of the Congress. (H.T. Red State for Graphic)