How Obama went from bulls–t to dishonesty

JamesL

JamesL

obama2.jpg


How Americans see President Obama changed in an important way this week. It’s because there is a huge difference between lies and bullshit.

Obama says a lot of things that are not true, even nonsensical. But it’s easy to shrug off most of these, because they aren’t really lies. They’re just bullshit.

Bullshit is airy, meaningless drivel, the stuff that campaigns are made of. Or it’s a misleading oversimplification with hidden qualifiers. Not only do we forgive bullshit, we like it. Especially suckers who have far too high an opinion of the importance and efficacy of politicians, people who hope casting a ballot is a way to expunge sin or join a noble crusade. “We are the ones we have been waiting for”? Not a lie. Just bullshit.

Even when Obama made seemingly specific promises like, “I want to go line by line through every item in the federal budget and eliminate programs that don’t work,” he left himself wiggle room. He still wants to do that, no doubt. He’s just too busy filling out his March Madness brackets and golfing. Or maybe he just couldn’t find a program that fails by his standards.

While he was saying things like, “I will make sure we renegotiate NAFTA” in an effort to match Hillary Clinton’s equally insincere blather about turning back the clock on the free trade agreement that her husband vigorously promoted and signed, Obama aides were going around telling Canadian officials that this was just “rhetoric” — a nice word for “bullshit.”

Obama denounced the individual mandate to purchase health insurance during the primaries to get to Hillary’s left, but his stated reason was that it wouldn’t be fair to force people to buy health insurance if they couldn’t afford it. You could argue he covered himself by including in the law large subsidies — your income can be four times the poverty line ($94,000) and you still qualify for aid.

He said he would close Guantanamo but that was just campaign blather for suckers — an applause line, not a serious policy proposal. As any student of the matter knew, there wasn’t a better alternative, and nobody really cares about Guantanamo detainees anyway. It was just opportunistic Bush-bashing.

This week was something new. It was the week Obama was revealed to be a stone-cold liar.

Some 10 million Americans are going to lose their health insurance as a direct result of the Affordable Care Act.

On June 15, 2009, Obama said, in one of hundreds of similar statements, “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

This wasn’t just bullshit. This was a lie.

This was a direct, specific detail that left no wiggle room. It couldn’t be excused as “campaign rhetoric” because he wasn’t running for anything in 2009. It wasn’t a gassy generality. It wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky platitude.

It was credible, concrete and important.

Even devoted members of the Barack Obama fan club are forced to concede that the president wasn’t telling the truth. “I think what he could have made is a more nuanced, accurate statement,” said James Carville. “The administration turns out to have misled the public,” admitted liberal columnist Jonathan Chait, a personal favorite of Obama’s. Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, who usually retails pro-Obama spin under the label “fact checker,” gave Obama four Pinocchios.

Obama and his minions are pretending they only said “the vast majority of Americans,” (nope), trying to deflect blame to insurance companies (won’t work, because of the “no one will take it away, no matter what” line) or to claim nonexistent caveats were there all along.

This week White House flack Jay Carney absurdly said Obama was “clear about a basic fact . . .” that you could keep your insurance “if it was available.” He sounded like a Publishers Clearinghouse letter saying “you just won 10 million dollars if you have the winning number.”

And it wasn’t what his boss said.

There is no escape. What Obama said wasn’t true and that’s all there is to it. To the American public, he is a different man than he was last week.

People can handle bullshit, but not dishonesty. We don’t like that. His approval rating touched an all-time low this week in the NBC/WSJ poll, and that was before his deception became the news of the week. Obama has rebranded himself as a liar, forever. He will carry this new label to his grave.

http://nypost.com/2013/11/02/how-obama-crossed-the-line-from-bulls-t-to-dishonesty/
 
Odumbo is a sleazy piece of shit.

Lying About Lies: The president is trying to reinvent the history of his you-can-keep-it promise on health care.

By Ron Fournier

It might not seem possible that President Obama could do more harm to his credibility and the public's faith in government than misleading Americans about health insurance reform. But he can. The president is now misleading the public about his deception.

In a speech last night to his political team, Obama said: "Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn't changed since the law passed."

No, no, no, no, no -- that's not what the Obama administration said. What they said was:

"That means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what." – President Obama, speech to the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009, during the debate over health insurance reform.

"And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn't happened yet. It won't happen in the future." – Obama, remarks in Portland, April 1, 2010, after the bill was signed into law.

These quotes are courtesy of Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who gave Obama four Pinocchios for the you-can-keep-it whopper, repeated countless times by Obama. "The president's statements were sweeping and unequivocal — and made both before and after the bill became law," Kessler wrote. "The White House now cites technicalities to avoid admitting that he went too far in his repeated pledge, which, after all, is one of the most famous statements of his presidency."

What Obama told supporters Monday is what he should have told the public all along. "So we wrote into the Affordable Care Act, you're grandfathered in on that plan. But if the insurance company changes it, then what we're saying is they've got to change it to a higher standard. They've got to make it better, they've got to improve the quality of the plan they are selling," Obama said at an Organizing for Action event. "That's part of the promise that we made too. That's why we went out of our way to make sure that the law allowed for grandfathering."

"If we had allowed these old plans to be downgraded, or sold to new enrollees once the law had already passed, then we would have broken an even more important promise -- making sure Americans gain access to health care that doesn't leave them one illness away from financial ruin," Obama said Monday. "The bottom line is that we are making the insurance market better for everybody and that's the right thing to do."

Watch the video of Obama reinventing history with the "what-we-said-was" construction. Notice how he is looking at notes. Remarkably, this was not an off-the-cuff remark; it was written, reviewed and approved by senior White House officials, then recited by the president. An orchestrated deceit.

Why didn't Obama add the caveats during his re-election campaign? His aides debated it. Some argued that the president had to shoot straight with the public. Others feared that he public wouldn't understand the nuance and GOP rival Mitt Romney would use it to his advantage.

The cynics won. The truth was buried. And the man who promised to run the most transparent administration in history participated in a lie.

On history's scale of deception, this one leaves a light footprint. Worse lies have been told by worse presidents, leading to more severe consequences, and you could argue that withholding a caveat is more a sin of omission. But this president is toying with a fragile commodity: his credibility. Once Americans stop believing in Obama, they will stop listening to him. They won't trust government to manage health care. And they will wonder what happened to reform-minded leader who promised never to lie to them.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/whit...ies-why-credibility-matters-to-obama-20131105
 
from an OLD White House blog posting:

Facts Are Stubborn Things

UPDATE: As part of our effort to push back on the misinformation about health insurance reform, we've launched WhiteHouse.gov/realitycheck. It's full of videos and tools you can use to share the facts with your friends and family. Check it out.

Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things."

Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.

In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to "eliminate" private coverage, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/U0XCl6OHgiM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


For the record, the President has consistently said that if you like your insurance plan, your doctor, or both, you will be able to keep them. He has even proposed eight consumer protections relating specifically to the health insurance industry.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/

Yes, facts are a stuborn thing but one's own words are even more meaningful. (check out 1:20 and 2:00 marks of the video)
 
To the true blue kool-aid drinkers it makes no difference, BUT it has made a dent. To those still sitting on the fence, however unbelievable there can still be someone on the fence about this issue, they have seen the man exposed. He lied, period. The entire ACA is based upon a lie. Had the president, or any other person in his administration told the truth, a truth they knew as they lied about it, a truth they knew from day one, the ACA never sees the light of day. It never would have been passed into law. They knew what it was, and they knew it wouldn't sell. From what was possibly the most inane, empty headed comment ever made, we have to pass it to see what's in it, to every other bullshit lie they spewed about this program, they knew all along it was a bait and switch con job. Just isn't any other way to slice it.
 
Wow, who knew? Obama is a bald-faced liar. Anyone that this is news to must have been asleep for the last five or six years. (Next news flash: the Clintons are evil corrupt dirtbags.)

The irony is he is now doubling down on his lies. The line now is that the cancelled policies were "lousy" or "substandard" and if those evil companies altered them, well by golly now they'll have to offer a first rate product as demanded by Obamacare.

As Megyn Kelly observed to that dolt Rep. Pallone, if the policies were so awful, why did 15 million people want to keep them? And who can forget his reply to her question as to why consumers shouldn't be able to decide what coverage they need? "It's the free market, Megyn," he announced, dripping with condescension.

Of course, it's anything but a free market. Obamacare forces people to buy coverage they neither want nor need, such as the infamous pediatric dentistry or OB/GYN coverage for elderly childless people. Why do they do this? So they can subsidize the cost of such coverage to their constituents, the urban welfare leeches and illegal aliens.

At the end of the day, Obamacare, like every other Obama program, is a giant transfer of resources from republican voters, eg white wage earners, to his supprters, welfare leeches, unionized govenrment workers and illegal immigrants.

Too bad the republicans are too timid to point thtis out to voters.
 
Quote from CaptainObvious:

To the true blue kool-aid drinkers it makes no difference, BUT it has made a dent. To those still sitting on the fence, however unbelievable there can still be someone on the fence about this issue, they have seen the man exposed. He lied, period. The entire ACA is based upon a lie. Had the president, or any other person in his administration told the truth, a truth they knew as they lied about it, a truth they knew from day one, the ACA never sees the light of day. It never would have been passed into law. They knew what it was, and they knew it wouldn't sell. From what was possibly the most inane, empty headed comment ever made, we have to pass it to see what's in it, to every other bullshit lie they spewed about this program, they knew all along it was a bait and switch con job. Just isn't any other way to slice it.
More...
He can't be reelected, so who cares if anyone is "on the fence" about him or not? All these efforts at persuasion are a huge waste of time, unless some kind of catharsis is all you're (not you particularly) after.
 
Quote from AAAintheBeltway:

Wow, who knew? Obama is a bald-faced liar. Anyone that this is news to must have been asleep for the last five or six years. (Next news flash: the Clintons are evil corrupt dirtbags.)

The irony is he is now doubling down on his lies. The line now is that the cancelled policies were "lousy" or "substandard" and if those evil companies altered them, well by golly now they'll have to offer a first rate product as demanded by Obamacare.

As Megyn Kelly observed to that dolt Rep. Pallone, if the policies were so awful, why did 15 million people want to keep them? And who can forget his reply to her question as to why consumers shouldn't be able to decide what coverage they need? "It's the free market, Megyn," he announced, dripping with condescension.

Of course, it's anything but a free market. Obamacare forces people to buy coverage they neither want nor need, such as the infamous pediatric dentistry or OB/GYN coverage for elderly childless people. Why do they do this? So they can subsidize the cost of such coverage to their constituents, the urban welfare leeches and illegal aliens.

At the end of the day, Obamacare, like every other Obama program, is a giant transfer of resources from republican voters, eg white wage earners, to his supprters, welfare leeches, unionized govenrment workers and illegal immigrants.

Too bad the republicans are too timid to point thtis out to voters.
More...

So true! Only libertarians want to point out these truths. Problem is, libertarians don't get voter attention, and republicans not standing up with balls, basically guarantees demonazi rule on America.:(
 
Quote from Ricter:

He can't be reelected, so who cares if anyone is "on the fence" about him or not? All these efforts at persuasion are a huge waste of time, unless some kind of catharsis is all you're (not you particularly) after.
More...

He cannot be re-elected, thankfully, but others just like him are lined up ready to continue the master plan. It's not about being on the fence regarding Obama. It's about being on the fence whether or not one thinks the leftist agenda is anything other than Marxist philosophy wrapped in an American flag. People with something to lose need to be told, and told in no uncertain terms, that supporting this idealogy means opening up their wallets to the government and letting the government, and only the government, decide what you'll spend your money on.
 
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