Lies My President Told Me
Thinking back to the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein hid WMD’s, and the response across the political spectrum when those WMD’s failed to appear, I have to call it like it is: President Obama is a Liar.
“But, Aggie, who could have predicted the depth and breadth of the downturn?” you query.
To which I succinctly reply, “Doesn’t matter. He lied.” Turnabout is fair play.
A couple posts back there is a video showing him lying about Khaled Sheik Mohammed and his future plans for trying him at GITMO, not in Manhattan. I just love it when Obama convicts himself, posing for camera and lying. Now that’s review his lies about the economy:
Ten months ago, at the beginning of the great stimulus debate, President-elect Barack Obama’s economic advisers produced an unfortunate chart.
The chart plotted out two lines. One projected the unemployment rate through 2014 with a stimulus package; the other projected unemployment across the same period without it.
The first line — the hopeful line, the one that was used to sell $800 billion worth of stimulus — showed the rate of joblessness peaking this fall at 8 percent, and dropping swiftly thereafter. The second line — the no-stimulus scenario — showed unemployment peaking at 9 percent, holding there across 2010, and then declining in 2011 and 2012.
Now reality has produced numbers of its own. In every month since May, the unemployment rate has been roughly a percentage point higher than the chart’s grimmer, stimulus-free scenario. This October, when Obama’s advisers predicted that unemployment would stand at 8 percent with the stimulus and just under 9 percent without it, the actual jobless rate leaped to 10.4 percent.
Interestingly, although the UN, the CIA, and European intelligence sources all believed that Saddam had WMDs, the fact that Bush told us that Saddam had WMDs, based on the best intelligence available at the time, was a LIE. Do you remember, gentle reader? So how is it that the NY Times columnist gives Obama a pass?
This dire figure isn’t Barack Obama’s fault. Even in an age of near-trillion-dollar spending sprees, the president of the United States has only limited influence over the unemployment numbers.
Not a total pass, and we’ll take what we can get:
But the White House spent the winter pretending otherwise. The stimulus bill was framed and sold primarily as a jobs bill, and the Obama administration placed a substantial bet on the promise that the unemployment rate would start dropping before 2010 arrived.
When the stimulus passed with almost no Republican support, Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, declared that “the most important number … is how many jobs it produces, not how many votes it gets.”
He was right. But with unemployment near a 25-year high, that “most important number” isn’t looking very good. The White House is stuck arguing counterfactuals — how much worse the economy would be without the stimulus — and trumpeting obviously inflated estimates of how many jobs have been “created or saved” by federal dollars.
Bozos on Parade.
- Aggie