It looks like Joe Wilson was right. Wilson, the Republican Congressman from South Carolina, gained instant notoriety when, in the middle of Obama’s September 9, 2009 State of the Union address, Wilson spontaneously yelled out “YOU LIE!” after listening to our Obfuscator-in-Chief drone on about the supposed glories of the new ObamaCare law. In retrospect, it was not that Wilson broke decorum with his outburst that he should be faulted for, but for his failure to specify which of the many Obama lies he was referring to.
Wilson’s accusation has just been given greater validity with the announcement that Obama has won PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” Award. PolitiFact is the Pulitzer-prize winning column of the Tampa Bay Times, which takes claims by politicians and other public figures and rates their truthfulness.
And there is not a lot of truthfulness in Obama’s claim that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” This wasn’t an unscripted, off-the-cuff comment that Obama could be excused for uttering in the heat of a partisan speech defending his health care reform law, but a claim made more than three dozen times, without caveats, without addendum, and without fine print. He said that if we like our doctors or health insurance plans, we can keep them, “PERIOD.”
Yet even as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius touted, during a House hearing on the ObamaCare rollout this week, the 364,682 that have now enrolled in ObamaCare exchanges (which is just over 10% of the administration’s goal for this point), she carefully avoided dealing with the fact that more than FIVE MILLION Americans has lost their private insurance coverage because of the ObamaCare law, with tens of millions more Americans expected to lose coverage in 2014.
Yet as gargantuan as this lie was, it was just the latest in a very long string of lies told by Obama, who more and more seems genetically incapable of telling the truth. Obama and his administration hacks have lied about Fast and Furious (the secret program which funneled dangerous assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels, resulting in the deaths of at least two American law enforcement agents and hundreds of Mexican citizens), and Benghazi (where our diplomatic personnel were denied, despite repeated pleas, additional security in the weeks leading up to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; four Americans died as a result, and for weeks after they knew it to be false, they blamed the attack on an obscure YouTube video critical of Islam). They lied about NSA spying, initially denying the fact that the NSA collects and stores the digital communications data of every phone call, text message, social media post, and web search of every American citizen.
The Obama administration also lied about the IRS targeting conservative/TEA Party groups for intimidation and harassment, denying their tax-exempt applications for years. Obama recently doubled down on this lie, claiming that nothing improper occurred, which is a bold move considering that we now have incontrovertible proof, in the form of first-hand testimony and a wealth of internal communications, showing that those fearing the revelation of these tactics included not only senior IRS officials, but senior Treasury Department officials (including the General Counsel, and the Deputy Secretary) and the Office of the White House Counsel).
Even these lies are just skimming the surface. Obama lied when he claimed he’d never allow a lobbyist to work in his administration, a promise he broke almost immediately upon entering office while hiring dozens of former lobbyists. He lied about cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term, instead quadrupling Bush’s largest deficit. He still lies when he blames the sequester on Republicans, which was a tactic that his own administration came up with.
He lied about domestic oil production, claiming credit for recent increases (the lie is in him taking claim for the increases, which have occurred on private land, when he has fought tooth and nail to stop or slow domestic oil production). He lied about “shovel-ready jobs,” about what the Citizens United ruling actually allows, about Obamacare not increasing the deficit “one dime,” about instituting “Pay As You Go” budgets, about covering the ObamaCare debates on C-SPAN to increase transparency, and about there being no earmarks in the stimulus bill. The list is virtually endless.
So, it is entirely proper for a person of sound mind and moral integrity to wonder why Americans would re-elect a man who is so clearly devoid of integrity and character. Why re-elect a man who has told so many lies to us? Sadly, that is a conundrum I’ve yet to solve, and I can only assume that the American people have come to personify socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw’s maxim that “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.”
Founding Father Samuel Adams, writing to James Warren in 1775, declared the necessity of electing honest men and women to offices wielding power, stating that “Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters.”
As we look across the political landscape today, can we point to more than a handful of elected officials on the national stage that we can say, emphatically and without hesitation, are men or women of “unexceptionable characters,” who we know without doubt, would rather give up their own lives than utter a lie or damage their integrity? In a day when we have to carefully parse words to determine what the meaning of “is” is, is it really any wonder that we see such widespread corruption among government officials? Is it any wonder that for these politicians, the truth is simply collateral damage in the War for Power, where the winner gets to control trillions of dollars, and control every aspect of the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans?
The Founding Fathers, arguably the greatest assemblage of political and philosophical minds in history, understood human nature. They understood that it is the nature of man, when he has power, to expand and abuse that power. Therefore, they took advantage of that nature and devised a form of government in which power was divided among three branches and two levels (federal and state, local governments being creations of the state and therefore subject to their power), in order that any encroachment by one branch or level would necessarily come at the expense of another, which would instigate retaliation. As a result, power grabs would be temporary and incremental.
We are often told today that the personal character of those in power over us is not as important as their policy positions, and as a result we get a government full of the most corrupt among us, with those who try to be honest getting crushed under the wheels of power.
Barack Obama is not the problem. He is simply the most obvious manifestation of the problem, which is that the American people don’t care who rules them so long as they get a never-ending stream of goodies provided at someone else’s expense. So long as we continue to support what can be gotten away with, rather than what is right, we will all continue to suffer from economic burdens and an erosion of personal liberty until, at long last, the crumbling façade of a one great republic will come crashing down around us.
