President Barack "I Didn't Do It" Obama - Derek Hunter - [page]

President Barack "I Didn't Do It" Obama - Derek Hunter 

It’s one thing for a politician to “massage” the truth ... it happens all the time. But it’s quite another for one to so brazenly repeat an easily disprovable lie. 

But, as in the case of President Obama and sequestration, when the fear of being caught in a lie is removed because those charged with being “watchdogs” are active participants, brazenly lying carries no more risk than saying “hello.”

Sequester, automatic across-the-board reductions in the rate of increase in government spending – commonly and lazily called “spending cuts” by the media – was the spawn of the Obama administration. You’d never know it to hear him talk about it. During the campaign the president lied repeatedly about the origin of this monster, but he was the Dr. Frankenstein here.

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, in a piece not posted to the Internet until a time generally reserved for incriminating government document dumps (5:59 pm Friday), reminded the world, “The automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors...” 

The president approved the plan put forth by his employees and, in direct contrast to his current rhetoric, agreed to a deal with Republicans that “included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.”

He has since won re-election, which apparently means any agreement made beforehand is not only no longer valid, but never happened. The media, too busy focusing on the important issues facing the country such as complaining about not getting a picture of the president with Tiger Woods, haven’t bothered to point out any of this.

Rather than the tough medicine President Obama created to begin, on a miniscule scale, addressing our ballooning government spending, he treats sequester as a Frankenstein’s monster birthed by Republicans. But, as Woodward reminds us, paternity lies firmly at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.