Monthly Archives: October 2012

Lies of my President, Part…Too Many

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This is Part XX 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.

Kimberly Strassel, writing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, describes a series of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s…changing…positions.  She’s polite and lays these variations off onto a psychology malady (a legitimate one) called projection.  She’s being polite; I have no such constraints.  Some of Obama’s changes are outright lies.  Herewith are the lowlights of Obama’s claims; RTWT.

I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program—Illinois state Senator Barack Obama, June 2003.

I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter—President Obama, August 2009.

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Leadership means that the buck stops here….  I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit—Senator Barack Obama, March 2006.

It is not acceptable for us not to raise the debt ceiling and to allow the US government to default—President Obama, July 2011.

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We have an idea for the trigger….  Sequestration—Obama Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew in 2011, as reported in Bob Woodward’s The Price of Politics.

First of all, the sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed—President Obama, October 2012.

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If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election—Senator Obama, 2007.

We’ve made the decision not to participate in the public financing system for the general election—Senator Obama, June 2008.

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I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign—Senator Obama, June 2008.

The way Bush has done it over the last eight years is…[he] added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back….  That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic—Senator Obama, July 2008.

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Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive—President Obama, April 2009, in France.

We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms—President Obama, April 2009, in Trinidad and Tobago.

Nothing Governor Romney just said is true, starting with this notion of me apologizing—Barack Obama, October 2012, on whether he went on a global apology tour.

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So if somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them—Senator Obama, January 2008, on his plans to financially penalize coal plants.

Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution—Senator Obama, August 2008.

Here’s what I’ve done since I’ve been president.  We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years.  Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades.  We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment—President Obama, October 2012.

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Economics

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We’re well aware of the role of economics in our daily affairs and in the aggregated domestic affairs of our country.  The quality of our economy directly relates to our and to our nation’s prosperity.  But what is the role of economics in our foreign and defense policies?  Our economy is no less critical there.

General George Marshall once said

The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.

A successful economy plays a role in this prevention through a number of pathways.

The role of economics in foreign policy

Included among the paths is the ability to aid our allies, our friends, and those who wish to leave their current orbit and if not align with us, at least to begin to chart their own independent course.  A strong economy makes this possible.  The surplus from that can fund support for those nations struggling to get free of their current restraints—both their own and those from foreign domination.  Our strong economy, through the trade relationships our businesses create, can aid other economies as they struggle through their own recessions—and their resulting stronger economies can, through those same trade relationships, then aid our own in similar circumstance.

Another path is through the capacity to support the economic development (and through that, the social and political development) of less fortunate nations, both those in the developing world and those whose development has been stunted by being trapped under foreign domination—the follow-on condition of those nations just broken free.  Our economic strength here is especially useful in guiding the political and social development of these nations as well as their economic evolution.  By aiding these nations to develop as democracies with free market economies, we not only help them to find their own strength and prosperity, we deny the nations of tyranny the resources they need for their aggression, and we push those tyrannies back from our own shores.  This also is facilitated by our very success at home, which demonstrates the superiority of our economic methods.  As above, this is possible only from our own economic surplus.

A third path is to work with nations that are committed to the principles of free enterprise, and of freedom generally (which collection will overlap greatly, but are not coincident with, the group comprising our friends and allies), to strengthen all of us economically and politically and thereby to build, further, a bulwark against those tyrannies, who otherwise would become tempted to test us in battle, and perhaps win.

A fourth path is as a magnet for immigrants who want to come here share in our success—economically, to be sure—that’s the proximate magnet—but also our success politically and culturally.  These immigrants are a prime source constant renewal for us, in energy and in problem-solving.

The role of economics in defense policy

A strong economy creates the ability to fund, conduct R&D for, and equip our national defense system.  Without a successful national defense system, we very quickly will have no economy to defend, no nation to defend.

A strong economy enables the next step—the ability to fund the actual use of our national defense system, which usage is by its nature destructive of that system and which destruction must be replaced during the conflicts and after them.  Yes, we will be tested in battle, even though the means of testing will evolve, as the events of 11 Sep 2001 and after have demonstrated.

A strong economy gives us the wherewithal to preposition equipment and supplies near flash points.  These are, to be sure, targets, but they’re useful in the power projection phase of conflicts, and they can be useful in delivering quick reaction forces to the flash location(s) when they start to ignite.

A strong economy creates the ability to help other nations develop their own defense capacity: arms support, arms development support, and so on.  Such defense arrangements also can support economic success in the recipient nations: a common constituent of arms sales agreements is the assembly of purchased weapons in the buying nation’s factories, which represents employment for the citizens of those nations.

Related to the above, a strong economy facilitates reciprocal R&D agreements with our allies and friends.  This leads to greater commonality of key supply items, which simplifies the logistic problems inherent in coalition war.

A strong economy facilitates our maintaining a force with the technology and the numbers to enable us to hold open the world’s sea lanes.  This, by itself, creates a virtuous circle: free and easy transport of trade goods over the world’s waterways facilitates free trade, which leads to greater prosperity and stronger economies for all concerned, which leads to increased free trade and an easier time maintaining and improving those forces guarding the sea lanes.

Notice, too, that all of this adds up to a forward defense of our nation so as to minimize the likelihood that the initial, critical blows of a conflict land in our homeland.

In the end, the very success of our economy—our evident prosperity and freedom—serves as an empirical example of the rightness of our way of life.  It becomes a magnet drawing other nations to our methods, or at least to try them, it draws other nations to send their sons and daughters to our universities, where they not only will learn the academics of our institutions (whether economics, or science, or engineering, or philosophy, or…), but simply by being here through much of their formative years, these students also will learn the American way of life through immersion in it.

Moreover, our free market, capitalist economy, founded on individual liberty, individual responsibility, and individual ownership of property—our bodies and our real and our intellectual property—is what gives us the moral strength and the prosperity to constantly grow, to steadfastly maintain our freedom, to aid others, whether our neighbors or those wanting out from under.

Pick One

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David Wessel, writing in a recent Wall Street Journal, reports that

Chief executives of more than 80 big-name US corporations…in a statement to be released on Thursday, say any fiscal plan “that can succeed both financially and politically” has to limit the growth of health-care spending, make Social Security solvent and “include comprehensive and pro-growth tax reform, which broadens the base, lowers rates, raises revenues and reduces the deficit.”

Then Wessel himself makes this remark [emphasis added]:

The declaration differs sharply from those of several other business groups, which urge Washington to deal with the deficit and avoid across-the-board spending cuts and tax increases set for year-end—but avoid any stance on the politically charged issue of raising taxes.

This is an all too common conflation of two separate questions, but it’s amazing to see it coming from a Pulitzer Prize-winning economics journalist.

Of course raising tax revenue is different from raising taxes: the latter is merely one way to achieve the former.  But Wessel compounds his confusion by repeating it:

The CEOs who signed the manifesto deem tax increases inevitable no matter which party succeeds at the polls in November. “There is no possible way; you can do the arithmetic a million different ways” to avoid raising taxes, said Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna.

Notice that: Wessel directly contradicts the CEOs in their statement, which he quoted above.  And then he carefully provides his confused “paraphrase” of raising taxes outside another direct quote.  Yet Wessel then notes the following:

The executives didn’t endorse Mr. Obama’s proposal to raise the marginal income-tax rates for the top 2% of taxpayers or any other proposal.  Rather, they called for an overhaul of the tax code that, among things, would eliminate or reduce deductions, credits and loopholes (known as “broadening the base”), and one that also would bring the Treasury more revenue than the existing code does.

It’s no wonder Americans are having trouble sorting through the question of tax reform when the so-called experts can’t even trouble themselves to keep matters straight in their own writings.

What Did He Know

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…and when did he know it?

Recall that for weeks after the terrorist attack on our Libyan consulate in Benghazi Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama and his staff and surrogates insisted that the attack was the result of mob action in response to a video.  Recall further that in the second Presidential debate Obama claimed that he’d called it a terrorist attack the day after in a Rose Garden speech.  Pay no attention to the folks behind the door making those later claims of reaction-to-a-video after Obama’s claimed Rose Garden characterization.

Fox News‘ Chad Pegram has obtained a slew of emails sent in near real-time as the attack was in progress and then winding down, and Fox News has published three of them (they also can be viewed here).

They are presented here.

and

and

These seem clear enough; however, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now is busily denying their significance.

Posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence.  And I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be.

See no evil, hear no evil….

Maybe They Should Just Stick to the Subject

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It has seemed to me, in the present campaign season, that there is considerable indiscipline in candidates’ political speech.  We might expect this out of citizen representatives, for whom public office is an additional duty and so are not schooled in words.  However, for those for whom politics is an avocation, and so words are their stock in trade, this is less understandable and not at all acceptable.  Some examples will illustrate.

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said, on the subject of abortion by a woman made pregnant by a rape,

I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen [, and so I oppose abortion in such a circumstance].

That Democrats have chosen to misinterpret Mourdock as saying that God intended the rape itself is beside the point.

Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin made much the same mistake:

From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare.  If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.  But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.

Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Joe Biden is well known for his speaking mistakes, one of the most recent of which is his claim to a predominantly black audience that Republicans want to “put y’all back in chains.”

Then there’s Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s post-first debate loss claim that Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney won by lying and Obama’s continued steady drumbeat that Romney still is lying.

But these remarks have, in fact, jeopardized these men’s (re)election chances through their blatant outlandishness.  The carelessness of this speech, by men who know better, goes beyond that, though; it denies us Americans of our right to know what’s truly in the minds of these men who claim to want to represent us.

Mourdock and Akins, for instance, would have been better served to leave aside the extraneous verbiage, apparently added solely for the purpose of being…cute.  As The Washington Post put it,

[They] could not, of course, walk away from [their] deeply held view that abortion shouldn’t be lawful even in cases of rape.  But [they] didn’t need to.  [They] just needed to stop [their] theology lesson with the proposition that life is a gift from God.

Biden didn’t need to clown around with serious subjects.  It would have been sufficient, in the example, for instance, to argue that Republican preference for less regulation would result in greater loss of individual freedom in dealings with Wall Street.

Obama’s drumbeat of “he lies” as his response to anyone who disagrees with him simply destroys the credibility of his own position through his evident reluctance to argue for that.

Indeed, these men’s ad hominem remarks, whether intended to be funny or serious, are foolish, and self-demeaning.  As Charles Krauthammer said recently with his cynical tongue in his cheek, “Always tell the truth; it’s easier to memorize.”

Practically, stick to the subject.  There are fewer opportunities for shooting yourself in the foot when you stay with what you know.