In the 2004 movie “Garden State,” Natalie Portman plays Sam, a character who just can’t stop lying. “I don't even know why I do it. It's like ... it's like a tick, I mean sometimes I hear myself say something and then I think, Wow, that wasn't even remotely true,” she explains to the lucky soon-to-be-boyfriend Zach Braff.
Five years later, Sam would be working for Obama. Why? Because she lies and since she’s cute and charismatic, no one cares.
What a perfect spokeswoman for the Obama administration. They lie with reckless abandon. But Obama flashes his trademark smile and no one notices – especially the media.
We are one month in to a marathon game of liar’s poker and the American public is playing the losing hand. It’s not as if the Obama people are stupid. They aren’t. They aren’t even compulsive or pathological. They are simply that breed apart from ordinary humans called politicians.
That was the one thing they claimed they weren’t. The one big “change” from previous
Welcome to the Pinocchio administration – only Obama is the one pulling the strings on the media. The rest of us in the audience watch fascinated.
You won’t hear about the lying on ABC, CBS or NBC. Or read it in The Washington Post or New York Times either. Last year, the news media threw considerable influence behind President Pinocchio. Now journalism is in such financial distress, they’d be hard-pressed to fact check his cereal box. Besides it’s a sin of Washington etiquette to call deliberate political misstatements “lies.” Only the uncouth call them actual lies.
Remember the Barack Obama who proposed pulling our troops out of Iraq by the end of 2008? “The days of our open-ended commitment must come to a close,” he told the Senate, according to a Jan. 31, 2007, Post article. Now, according to the Associated Press, the open-ended commitment has returned with “as many as 50,000 troops to remain behind to train Iraqi forces and protect U.S. interests.” Even anti-war lefties think he lied. They are right – for once.
Remember that guy Obama who supported gun rights? He’s just a faint memory. A year ago, in an interview with Politico, Obama was reminded that supported gun ownership: “You said recently, ‘I have no intention of taking away folks’ guns.’ But you support the D.C. handgun ban, and you've said that it's constitutional. How do you reconcile those two positions?”
Even then he hemmed and hawed, concluding: “We can have reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respect the Second Amendment and people's traditions.” “Reasonable, thoughtful” are words unknown to Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder already has tried to link the Mexican narco-wars to U.S. gun sales and go after supposed “assault weapons.”
Obama’s record on government and the economy is actually worse. He and his surrogates keep maintaining that his budget won’t hurt the pockets of 95 percent of Americans who will get a tax cut.
They lie. The lead editorial in the Feb. 27 Wall Street Journal showed by just how much. Using 2006 tax records, the Journal showed how a tax hike won’t begin to pay the 2010 budget of the $4 trillion. Even if the government were to confiscate (steal) every penny made by those who earn $250,000 and above, it would only meet one-third of the goal.
To pay for that whole $4 trillion budget, the government would have to pilfer “every taxable ‘dime’ of everyone earning more than $75,000.” That would just barely meet the goal, but those are 2006 numbers when the economy was good. In 2010, we’d need to go even lower.
A tax cut for 95 percent? Not hardly. The government will give money with one hand and take it back and loads more with the other – lying to us the whole time.
George Stephanopoulos summed it up well during his March 1 “This Week” show when, with a slip of the tongue, he referred to the omnibus spending bill as “omni-nous spending” – an appropriate cross between omnibus and ominous spending.
No kidding. It takes accidental phrasing to get honesty from the mainstream press – especially someone like Stephanopoulos who burns his cell phone minutes strategizing with his long-time Democrat buddies like James Carville, Paul Begala and Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
The rest of the time, we get precious little about how we’ll pay through the nose and every other orifice. Instead, it’s just reheated talking points about 95 percent of us getting tax cuts. To quote Sam, “Wow, that wasn't even remotely true.”
Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Fellow and Vice President of the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute [1]. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum and he can be seen each Thursday from 9-10:30 on Foxnews.com’s “Strategy Room.”