Lies of my President, Part 6

This is Part 6 of my series on the lies told by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the nearly four years in which he’s been in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with his dishonesty while in office.

Here are some of Obama’s campaign ad lies (as opposed to the exaggeration, hype, and distortion that are part and parcel of campaign ads), from The Wall Street Journal.

One Obama spot 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 thoroughly discredited, including by PolitiFact Virginia and editorials in this newspaper.

In fact, the Romney plan includes reductions in tax rates across the board—for wealthy, middle class, and the poor (to the extent the latter pay any taxes at all)—while eliminating many deductions.  Since most of the deductions to be eliminated are taken primarily by the upper middle class and wealthy, this would reduce the impact of the rate reduction for those compared to the middle class and poor—while still reducing those rates across the board.  No $2,000 increase.

Another ad says, “As a corporate raider, [Mr. Romney] shipped jobs to China and Mexico.” In response, the Washington Post editorialized, “On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue.”

The Post‘s Fact Checker article debunks the “corporate raider” slur, and it identifies the jobs outsourcing claim as an Obama cynical distortion.

An Obama ad aimed at northern Virginia women intones, “Mitt Romney opposes requiring coverage for contraception.”  In fact, Mr. Romney opposes the president’s unprecedented assault on religious liberties—in this case, the federal government forcing religious institutions (like church-sponsored hospitals, schools and charities) to provide insurance coverage for contraception in violation of their fundamental moral values and, incidentally, the First Amendment.

There’s nothing to add to this correction.

Finally, there’s this whopper in front of an Hispanic audience—the recent Univision “Town Hall” interview—now about his own performance in office:

Obama claimed that his Justice Department’s botched “Fast and Furious” gunrunning program was “begun under the previous administration.”  This time it was ABC’s Jake Tapper correcting the record, pointing out, “it was started in October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency.”

This is a rather blatant lie.  The program to which Obama is pretending to refer, the Wide Receiver program run under President Bush the Younger’s DoJ, had a number of significant differences with Obama’s Fast and Furious program, beyond the fact that Wide Receiver was terminated before the end of Bush’s term.

There are two differences of particular interest.  On the one hand, the program was done in coordination with the Mexican government, instead of behind its back, as was Fast and Furious.  On the other hand, far fewer guns were involved—about a quarter of the number of Fast and Furious.  In the end, Wide Receiver was terminated because it wasn’t working—most of the weapons were, in fact, lost.

But Obama’s DoJ apparently thought walking four times as many guns and doing it in secret from the Mexican government would help their version succeed.

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