All politicians circumnavigate the truth – that is one political disease that will never be eradicated. It comes with the territory. When a president of the United States engages in blatant lying, however, on issues that are readily verifiable, there can be only one reasonable explanation. That president believes- in Obama’s case with good reason – that the media will cover up his terminological inexactitudes. They will cover up for a black president what they would not now ever dream of covering up for a president of any other skin pigmentation. And that is contemptible racial discrimination.
Obama failed, however, with respect to his great sequester lie, to take account of one journalist – Bob Woodward of The Washington Post – whose entire reputation depends on speaking truth to power. And once again, in this instance, Bob Woodward lives up to his remarkable reputation.
The Obama-lie under consideration relates to the forthcoming budget sequester – the $85 billion of across the board federal spending cuts that will begin on March 1, 2013 and extend over the coming ten years, for a total cut of $1.2 trillion. The first occasion of this Obama-lie occurred on October 22, 2012, when the President attempted to displace the blame for this initiative onto Congress. The Obama-lie could not be less ambiguous:
“The sequester is not something I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” (Bob Woodward, ‘Obama’s deal-changer’, The Washington Post, February 24, 2013
Obama was supported in this lie two-days later by his chief-of-staff, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the sequester negotiations in 2011. Again the lie could not be less ambiguous:
“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger. It was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there should be an automatic measure.” (Bob Woodward, ibid.)
In his extensive research for his book,The Price of Politics, Bob Woodward discovered the big lie. He demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brain-child of Jack Lew and White House congressional relations chief, Rob Nabors.
“Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D-Nev). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were already involved. Nabors has told others that they checked with the president bwefore going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise…the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on, an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months..) Bob Woodward, ‘Obama’s deal-changer’, The Washington Post, February 24, 2013
So there you have it folks, straight from the typewriter of the hero of Watergate. Whose version do you believe, and why?
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